Plumber Lead Generation: SEO vs Brand Search

Let's look at different ways that you can bring leads to your plumbing business. You can do it via;

• Google Search.
• SEO type things.
• Or you can have people search for your brand name. This is another way of addressing the visibility issue.

Looking For Your Business Via Google Search

So let's just look at the search process. Somebody searches plumber near me.

They hit the Google Search page and the search results result page shows.

They see competitors ads, they see competitor maps listings, and they see competitor organic listings as well. So this is kind of what it is. It's a very competitive search result and there's lots of different results types.

• The first one is the Google Ads, so four of those.
• The next one is the maps listings. Often there's three or four. Some of them include listings for ads like this one here.
• Then there are some organic listings. And these are obviously quite high authority sites like Jim's Plumbing, which is just a national brand, and they also include lots of listing sites like Yellow Pages.
• Often you'll see not just Yellow Pages, but you'll see results for Air Tasker, One Flare and many more of the aggregators like Hipages and True Local. You quite often see the results in there as well.
• And then also in that search result page for that same search is the people always ask and other rich snippets.
• And then last of all, there's another batch of ads that sit on the bottom of the page.

So you can see it's actually a really competitive place to be getting leads from;

• It's hard to get visibility. You have to pay for ads or you have to do a mountain of SEO work. It's hard to keep the visibility because you have to keep it all up all the time.
• And whenever you're on the page, even if you show up on listing number two or three, competitors are still going to get a share of your leads.

Google Keeps Eroding Business Organic Listings

The other thing that keeps going on with this is that Google keeps chipping away at the organic listings. They;

• Expanded site links, they added the knowledge graph, 
• Chucked Google Shopping results in there. 
• Reduced the maps listing from seven to three. 
• Moved Google AdWords from the right hand panel to the top and the bottom.
• Added answers.
• Put video carousels in,
• Expanded Snippets and other answers

And they're just going to carry on eroding that. Because in its essence, that search result page is their way of monetising their business.

They're going to put ads into local services ads, which they've done in the US and the UK. They're just going to keep eroding at it because they don't have a choice.

Every time they want more profit, they're going to have to do something else.

Let's Not Foget Algorithm Changes And Mobile

Not only that, but there's more issues around trying to capture a space and search.

First of all is the mobile usage people. Just the screen sizes are much smaller. The ads show up on the top, the first four, and it takes a lot of scrolling to get past that, to get to the next, to see organic listings.

And they're constantly fiddling with algorithms, which is not just what's in the results, but also how they're displayed.

It's just getting harder and harder to get clicks on Google's organic listings.

And that makes the value of doing search engine optimization much less valuable. Nearly 40% of search don't result in a click to somewhere else (like your website. People search the result. They get the answer from the page, and then they just move on to do whatever they want to do.

So there's certainly a reduced benefit of doing SEO work.

Brand Search

The other alternative is that someone searches for your brand name from Google. So they search your brand name.

They hit the Google search page, they see your Business's Knowledge Panel, plus the reviews and the QA and A, and the content and all the details that you put on, and your own posts.

They might see your businesses website pages. They'll certainly see your local listings, and there might see the odd competitor ad as well. 

As you can see, you're in a much less competitive situation if people search for your brand.

This your Google home page, in a sense. Having people search for your brand is better by a long shot. It's much less competitive.

Building A Local Brand

And so the question is, how do you get people to search for your brand? Will you build your brand locally?

And you need to get people to search in your target market to search for your business by name. And now our Local Brand Builder marketing system does that. And that's the whole benefit of why it works better than spending a lot of money on SEO.