Organic SEO vs. PPC: Which Will Drive More Carpet Cleaning Leads?

Generating website traffic is not an easy feat for carpet cleaning businesses, but if you want more carpet cleaning leads and more customers, high traffic is a must.

Web traffic and sales leads are essential in any business, but especially key in the highly competitive world of carpet cleaning.

With so much competition, it’s essential to have a strong marketing strategy.

Comparing SEO and PPC

There are two key tools you can use to set your business apart; SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click). They are both useful in generating traffic of different types and at different rates. SEO may result in organic (free) traffic, but that doesn’t mean PPC isn’t the right choice for you.

SEO can take weeks or months to generate traffic, but PPC can lead to much quicker results. If your carpet cleaning business is in it for the long run, then SEO is one of the best choices you can make. On a short timeline, such as seasonal specials, PPC can be a wise option. To avoid poor campaign experiences, be nimble first, analyze what works and then scale it up.

This raises the question: which should you focus on? We’ll cover both the similarities & differences between the tools.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the act of optimizing your website to rank in the search engines for the terms that matter to your business. For example, “carpet cleaning Albequerque.” But it can be an intimidating marketing tactic. Patience is required since it takes time and understanding to reap the rewards.

But consider these statistics from Google:

• 93% of online experiences begin with search engines 
• Google processes 3.5 billion searches daily
• 89% of people state SEO is successful

These stats alone are not the whole story. There are many other advantages SEO can offer over PPC, bringing you more carpet cleaning leads over time, and for years to come. Let’s take a closer look.

Increase in Brand Authority

Having a high organic rank in the searches has a positive impact on your brand. A large majority of web searchers will ignore ads and may head straight to the organic search results.

If you are in the top three positions in the search engine results page, users will give more preference to your content. Your content makes a strong impression on your audience, and it speaks to your authority in the industry.

You can look at the image below to understand the click distribution of natural and paid search.

High ROI (Return on Investment)

In SEO, the cost of organic clicks is completely 100% free. On the other hand, you pay for every click in PPC. SEO can give a significant return compared to the investment. Of course, it takes hours of work to optimize a site for searches, but the payoff can continue for years.

Long-term Productivity

Remaining in the top spot in search engines for your SEO terms is not a matter of luck and there are no guarantees you’ll be there forever. A competitor can steal that spot from you by having better content and generating more backlinks to their page or site.

While appearing on the first page or as the first listing in a search is a luxury that can keep bearing fruit over the long term, it may take some ongoing maintenance to stay there. Link building, regular maintenance to your optimization, content updates, and other forms of traffic generation will all help your rankings hold their staying power.

In comparison, the effectiveness of a PPC campaign is directly associated with the amount you’re spending. If you choose to stop funding a PPC campaign, that traffic will stop showing up.

Pay Per Click

PPC is exactly that: paying for every click to your website. The most common form of PPC advertising is paid search, with tools like Google Ads. Sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and more also offer PPC options, and can show ads right in the feeds of the people you are targeting.

Maintaining your PPC campaigns is of the utmost importance because the costs are very real. You want to make sure that your money is being spent wisely.

Testing your campaigns, investing more heavily in the ads and search terms that work, and turning off campaigns that don’t perform are all examples of ways to maintain and improve your PPC efforts.

The Flexibility of PPC

SEO focuses only on search engine results, whereas PPC allows you to become visible on multiple sites. Your visibility depends on the type of ad, budget, and target audience. With PPC, because you are bidding on very specific terms and placing very specific ads, you have better control over the kind of traffic you’re generating.

For example, you and all of your competitors might all be bidding on “carpet cleaning Pittsburgh,” which makes it a more expensive term. So long as you’re all competing for that terms and trying outbid one another, the cost of those clicks will steadily increase. And you may have mixed results with your success rate in turning those carpet cleaning leads into bookings.

Get creative though, and you might be able to win a lot of business where your competitors aren’t looking. Consider the effectiveness of a term like “upholstery cleaning Allentown” or “flood cleanup Lawrenceville.” The fact is, they might not generate as many searches. But if you bid on those terms, have ads that match those terms, and your site has high-quality content related to those topics, you can close a lot of new leads that your competition has overlooked.

Speed

One of the best ways to test new markets and audiences is PPC. On the other hand, SEO is a serious commitment and also time-intensive strategy where you should put a lot of effort to expose your brand. And it may not pay dividends in the short term.

PPC is a game where you can experience instant exposure if you handle it correctly. The most crucial part of this strategy is to select the right search keywords to gain quality clicks.

Testing Works in PPC

You can steadily improve your performance in PPC by running multiple versions of an ad at the same time. It allows you to figure out the best-performing ads and then invest more in the ones that prove to perform. Here’s an incomplete list of the things you can test:

• Different keywords and phrases
• Ad headlines
• Main ad copy
• The offers in your ads
• The form on the landing page

All of the above are variables that can be tested and improved upon. You can see why larger companies often entrust their ad campaigns to PPC agencies, who can be constantly testing and improving, collecting meaningful data.

The Decision

So, which should you focus on, SEO or PPC?

I hope after reading this article, you understand that’s the wrong question in the first place. Both SEO & PPC campaigns can be of value for companies looking for more carpet cleaning leads.

Thus, it’s better to ask how should one split the online budget among the two options. Identifying the balance is the key for short-term as well as for long-term success. With PPC, you want to be able to afford your campaigns at the start, and as quickly as possible determine how much it costs to land a carpet cleaning lead. More importantly, track your success through to the booking stage, and learn what your cost-per-acquisition is for new customers and figure out what effect that has on your margins.

If your efforts prove to be profitable, there’s nothing to stop you from increasing the spend and growing your company. Meanwhile, your additional profits can also be funneled toward creating content that will bear fruit in the form of organic traffic down the line.

Want to learn about how carpet cleaning software can help you grow your business and turn more of your carpet cleaning leads into bookings on your schedule? Book a free, private demo of Vonigo.