42: SEO or Google Ads?
The SEO guy says that SEO is everything. The Google Ads guy says that you shouldn’t bother with SEO and just go straight to ads. So who’s right? Well… to be honest… they kinda both are! This is Clickstarter, I’m Dante St James. This is episode 42, and Day 8 of my daily series, April Foolproof Your Business. Today… SEO or Google Ads. A while ago I wrote a blog titled, The SEO Scam. It was all about how companies and backyard self-styled SEO experts were screwing over businesses all over the country by selling them the SEO dream… you know… that one that says, “I don’t care that I am 10 years behind everyone else and made a cheap website with some DIY page builder, this really convincing person in a call centre says that they’ll make me number 1 on Google.” I stand by my opinion that most SEO work is a scam. When someone says that they will get you from zero to hero by putting your website on the first page of Google or even at the very top of the rankings, they are either going to take your money and run, or they are going to use a technique to trick Google’s algorithm that will last may be a week or two before you’re caught out and you’re pushed down lower than you ever were before. So that must mean that Google Ads are the way to go, right? Well, not necessarily. For a lot of small businesses, attempting to advertise on Google is a complete waste of time! For example, in a regional town where a large infrastructure or resources project has recently ended, like Darwin, Gladstone, Port Hedland or Karratha, then trying to advertise yourself as an electrician, plumber or any trade that was in short supply during that economic bump is either going to cost you a fortune every time someone clicks on your ad, or you will be so far behind the biggest payers, that your ad won’t even show. So where do these two things work? Let’s look at an example of a company called Bynoe Drilling, a small business in the rural outskirts of Darwin in the Northern Territory. Despite being around for over 30 years, Gary from Bynoe Plumbing had no idea about online stuff. But he had a website built for him at a reasonable price thinking that the work would come. The problem is that most web designers are not search engine optimisers. In fact, very few are - even those that say they are. What they generally do, is, install a Wordpress website with a drag and drop page builder that they have used on dozens of other websites before you, go and install a plugin called Yoast, write in some pretty words about the page it’s installed on, and call it a day. This is pretty much what had happened with Gary’s site. It looked good. It ran ok. But none of the pre-work was ever done to connect the site to Google via Analytics and Search Console. No technical checking was done to see if the site was actually built in a way that Google could read properly. So when the European travellers who build the site were contacted to ask to help with his Google ranking, their answer was along the lines of “Oh - no we don’t do SEO. You’ll need to pay someone else to do that.” The trouble with SEO is that there are at least 47 major factors to consider when doing it. Everything from the structure of headings on the page, to whether a separate delivery network is used for images and even whether all that code has been rearranged to deliver it as fast as possible. And then, beneath that layer, there are at least 250 factors that Google takes into account each time you type in a search query to it. All this is way too much for Gary to deal with. He just wants more customers to get him to drill for bore water on their properties. He’s not a marketer or a web developer. So when we were approached to help him out with SEO, we took a serious look at the state of his website, his competitors already online, and did a serious and honest side by side comparison on whether it was worth him spending money on optimising for search results on Google - or just going and paying for ad...