Local Plumbing Businesses Need Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Local Plumbing Businesses Need Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Sometimes customers don’t notice that there is a problem with the pipes in their houses until things get bad, and then they call a plumber, who springs into action quickly.  When plumbers arrive at a customer’s house late at night or on a weekend, they sometimes implement a temporary solution to stop the flood or the leak from getting worse until they can implement a more permanent solution on the next business day.  Small businesses should view pay-per-click (PPC) advertising in a similar way.  Having to shell out money to Google every time someone clicks on an ad for your business is not an ideal situation, but it is effective at increasing the number of visitors to your site and getting a sizable percentage of them to engage your services.  For the inexperienced, PPC advertising is too time consuming to be worth the investment, but professional digital marketers like the WordPress developers at High Converting Media can do it expertly.

PPC Doesn’t Stand for “Plumbers, Please Come,” but It Might as Well

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is exactly what its name suggests or exactly the opposite of what its name suggests, depending on what you imagine when you hear the phrase “pay-per-click.”  You might be thinking of a phenomenon from the early days of the monetized Internet where businesses would pay professional mouse clickers to click on their sites.  These businesses were hoping to increase their search engine optimization (SEO) rankings, since the number of visits your site receives is one of the SEO metrics; therefore, they assumed that any old click would do, even if it came from someone in a distant ZIP code who had found the gig on Amazon Mechanical Turk.  It got to the point that some enterprising gig workers repurposed old cell phones as click farms.

That is not how modern PPC advertising works.  Instead, Google displays paid ads above the organic search results for business-related searches.  If you want one of the ads it displays to be one that leads to your plumbing company’s website, then you can bid on the search term.  Instead of charging you a flat fee, Google lets businesses bid on the amount they will pay each time a user clicks on the ad.

The PPC ad that displays on the search results page is only about two lines of text inside a rectangle marked “ad.”  When a user clicks on your ad, Google takes them to a landing page.  The landing page is not your whole website.  It is a single page with about 300 words of text advertising your business and its current promotional offer, and it prominently displays your company’s phone number and an online contact form that will go to your email inbox when users submit it.

How to Make PPC Advertising Profitable

Some of the advantages of PPC are so outstanding that you might think that PPC is to SEO what stealing the test answers and memorizing them is to studying.  With SEO, not only do you have to create an awesome website, but you have to keep updating it to keep it awesome, and even when your site makes it to the top of the organic search results, it is still below the PPC ads.  Running an effective PPC advertising campaign is not as easy as it sounds, though; if it were, everyone would just spend money on clicks instead of doing SEO.

The target audience is people who need to hire a plumber quickly.  Your ad and landing page need to show them everything they need to know at a glance.  If your landing page doesn’t convince the user to contact your business within 60 seconds, the user will just go back to the search results page and click on one of the organic results or, even worse, the PPC ad of one of your competitors.

For best results, your plumbing company needs to invest in both PPC advertising and SEO.  The most effective way to bring prospective customers to your plumbing business website is to hire High Converting Media to develop a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for your company, one that combines PPC advertising with other techniques.