As you begin your search to find a Spokane SEO consultant, you’ll find that some of these providers are not great at obtaining rankings for themselves. Which then begs the question, how many of these guys can get the job done for you? Hmmm…
Here’s an example of a search we just ran today 👉🏻 “spokane search engine consultant” (which happens to be a term we hold the #1 ranking for at the time of writing this).
You’ll see in the image above that three companies are trying to get your attention using PAID PPC ads for this search, but these providers typically hold inferior organic search engine ranking positions (SERPs) of their own. We don’t use PPC ads as our primary marketing strategy. We honestly don’t feel a need to because we rely on our ability to achieve numerous first page Google search ranking positions and depend on organic search traffic instead.
The uninitiated might assume these guys are at the “top” of the search results, so they must be the best. Those who use Google regularly often try to sidestep and avoid these ads because they’re usually not the most relevant match for our initial search query. After all, these advertisements did not appear there on merit; they secured the highest bid per click!
This kind of confusion can lead to heartaches later on in the optimization process. After all, many folks nowadays are getting duped into believing these PPC providers are good at what they do (SEO) based on these ads. Again some folks who search regularly will understand that these are paid advertisements, but others will mistake these PPC ads for organic search results, which is the intention of these advertisers.
However, the field of SEO (search engine optimization) does not include PPC ads. Paid advertising can help augment an existing organic keyword strategy, but it should never be your main focus unless you’d like to pay for every visit you get.
Selecting a Spokane SEO Consultant
We highly recommend you perform 10-15 different searches of your own to get a better sense of the overall search landscape for your industry. After doing so, you’ll have a much better understanding of who plays the game correctly and who is “paying to play.” There’s nothing to stop you from solely running PPC ads.
You don’t HAVE to optimize your website to bring in more organic search traffic. However, what people often fail to realize is that you will begin bringing in completely FREE traffic that will continue to feed your business new customers once you have an organic SEO strategy in place.
If you’re dependent on PPC ads for the entirety of your website traffic, as soon as you stop paying into the system, your traffic will come to a complete halt. Conversely, anyone who invests in their organic SEO will likely reap benefits for several months, if not years, even if they were to stop creating new content and optimizing their website. Well, as long as the agency doing the work knows what they’re doing of course, which is not always the case. Organic traffic often performs better than PPC ads do on average, and it’s often easier to convert your organic website visitors into paying customers (after all, these customers found you on their own and are much more likely to purchase products or services for that reason alone). They trust the process more than being solicited to, which is exactly what pay-per-click ads are – an online solicitation to get your attention during your search.
Do not simply go with the first company you find; that’s a great way to get burned or let down in the long run. Instead, start by selecting an SEO provider who has verified search ranking positions of their own who can help you in the same ways they do for themselves.
