Google, kijiji, ect. what you spending?

It’s surprising to hear that Kijiji works, but if it ain’t broke don’t fix it right. 5 jobs for $150/month is pretty good.

If you’re looking for an SEO professional… :wink:

[quote=“Prideisdead”]Kijiji is useful a lot where I’m from. And I get a lot of replies from my ads. I can post free of pay to be top ad ect.

I pay about 150 a month and get maybe 5 jobs from it.

Haven’t tried google ads yet or Facebook ads but I’m testing what works.

I wanna hire seo professionals and see how that works.[/quote]

We did Google optimization awhile back but it was shut down by the front office because the girl that does the accounting thought $300 a month was too much to spend on something she didn’t understand, heh. I’m pretty busy doing other things but at the time my limited tracking did not show a great deal of hits to the website. Trying to get that going again… Regardless of what people say, organic optimization is not “free”; unless of course your time is free, mine is quite valuable. A good organic optimization campaign imo will cost you just as much as a Google one will, or at least very close to it.

Just fired up a Facebook campaign for a month in conjunction with a Kindle Fire giveaway to try and work on our email data base. I’ll try and post how that turns out…

The thing that has been very profitable up to this point is direct marketing campaigns via the ACT/Swiftpage program where you can set up and target your custom created target groups from your existing customer data base on an as needed basis. People forget that their existing customers are the single biggest untapped revenue. Just sending out things like gutter cleaning reminders or free pre-winter roof inspections, etc. has generated literally thousands of dollars of business for us. It’s not always about getting more, it’s also about working with what you already have.

Retargeting is a great way to go and many companies underestimate the power of it.

A good organic campaign won’t necessarily cost you as much as a Google one. That’s not true at all. It’s not difficult to rank websites in the roofing niche because most sites are built poorly and in most cases our clients are not competing with other competitors for top ranking - they are competing against directories. You don’t have to charge thousands of dollars a month in the roofing niche for it to work properly. You just have to know what you are doing.

[quote=“Tar Monkey”]Regardless of what people say, organic optimization is not “free”; unless of course your time is free, mine is quite valuable. A good organic optimization campaign imo will cost you just as much as a Google one will, or at least very close to it.

People forget that their existing customers are the single biggest untapped revenue. Just sending out things like gutter cleaning reminders or free pre-winter roof inspections, etc. has generated literally thousands of dollars of business for us. It’s not always about getting more, it’s also about working with what you already have.[/quote]

Ok, reporting back… The direct emailing/kindle fire give-away campaign went well, ended up getting around 50ish “likes” and 5 good reviews of the company; all from existing customers. Well worth the small amount of time and money the whole thing took imo and we will continue to build off that solid base. The Facebook sponsored campaign was very lack luster. At this point I just don’t see it as something viable for local businesses. It’s better geared towards big corporations imo, think Wal-Mart, Lowes, etc. Our service area is small and we are a high end shop so the parameters were a 30mile radius and homeowners that avg 300k or more per year.

[quote=“Tar Monkey”]We did Google optimization awhile back but it was shut down by the front office because the girl that does the accounting thought $300 a month was too much to spend on something she didn’t understand, heh. I’m pretty busy doing other things but at the time my limited tracking did not show a great deal of hits to the website. Trying to get that going again… Regardless of what people say, organic optimization is not “free”; unless of course your time is free, mine is quite valuable. A good organic optimization campaign imo will cost you just as much as a Google one will, or at least very close to it.

Just fired up a Facebook campaign for a month in conjunction with a Kindle Fire giveaway to try and work on our email data base. I’ll try and post how that turns out…

The thing that has been very profitable up to this point is direct marketing campaigns via the ACT/Swiftpage program where you can set up and target your custom created target groups from your existing customer data base on an as needed basis. People forget that their existing customers are the single biggest untapped revenue. Just sending out things like gutter cleaning reminders or free pre-winter roof inspections, etc. has generated literally thousands of dollars of business for us. It’s not always about getting more, it’s also about working with what you already have.[/quote]

google.com/business/?gmbsrc … oC31zw_wcB

List here… Then set up a Yelp profile and have someone write a positive review. Use words like “Roofing in XYZ-City” ( put your city in there) in your words.

There are backlinks, there are all sorts of ways to build legitimate traffic. What you don’t want to do is what they consider “black hat” or “grey hat” ways of pointing business to your site. Google is ratcheting down and you will get nailed and dropped. It is something you can manage if you dedicate a few evenings to it. Here is good info for you. moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Here is some more good stuff. searchenginejournal.com/55-q … ould-love/

We have a full time SEO/marketing guy at one of my companies. We have managed to play with the big boys in the SEO space. When you google Roofing CRM, we fought our way to #1, all through organic efforts. Not a single paid ad. It took a year and a half to do it, and we will hover there in the top 1 or 2 based on our organic effort. The cool thing about hard work is you get recognized by sources as legitimate instead of just throwing money at a problem. We snatched up 2 magazine recommendations, unsolicited, because of how we run things.

You better be putting at least 3% of your revenue towards online marketing or you will not make it.

I thought I wanted to pitch in as I’ve helped a lot of roofers, garage door contractors, plumbers and other contractors over the last couple of years.

SEO is a really good source of traffic, if you know how to do it, however doing Adwords is considerably easier to get started with, but long term SEO will typically be cheaper.

The good thing about Adwords is the ability to measure everything and only bid on words that give you value, however you can easily spend a lot of money as other competing businesses will also compete for this traffic.

The problem with SEO is that it can be really difficult to find a good provider that is not going to charge you crazy sums. The cheaper ones will usually do a poor job, and the good ones might be too expensive for you.

To illustrate the power of SEO, I’ve managed to go from 12 organic visitors in December to an estimated 300 organic visitors in March for my website contractorquotes.us. Had I used Adwords to get this traffic, it would easily have costed me somewhere between $1.5-3k to purchase this traffic through Adwords.

I don’t provide SEO services for clients anymore, but I’d be happy to give you guys some pointers and a bit of help with regards to where you can start, if you need it, but please be as specific as possible.

As JakeD mentioned, SEO also makes your site seem more credible. And as I said, SEO is really something most contractors can make use of no matter if they sell roofing, garage doors installation, siding or anything else. SEO can really be a great investment.