FAQs

SEO is typically a more long-term game and involves the correct set up of your website and online presence, ultimately to bring you more organic search and referral traffic. You don’t pay for this traffic, but you’ll pay with time and money getting it right.

SEO should ALWAYS be an important element of your digital marketing strategy, but it’s often overlooked and underestimated by both business and web designers. (Side note: We build a basic SEO strategy into every web project we undertake).

The other problem with SEO is even if you are in the top 10 of organic Google results for your given search term(s), position #3 quickly becomes position #7/8, once you factor in ads and Google Maps listings.

Google Ads are a fast way of bringing in highly targeted traffic to your website. It is relatively fast to set up, and it is a much quicker way to generate traffic than SEO (generally). Both are ongoing investments, but you’ll only pay for Ads clicks when people are interested in your product.

With SEO you have to invest before you get the traffic to your website. With Google Ads, you generally only pay when people click through to your website.

Whenever we hear this opinion of Google/Bing Ads, the root cause is usually due to running campaigns incorrectly. Running a Google or Bing Ads campaign without knowing how to use the platform can be a recipe for burning money fast.

We’ve had clients who were running their own campaigns, but once we stepped in, we halved their monthly cost and increased the number of leads/calls they received each month. It is also not uncommon for us to take over a Google Ads account and get results that return many multiples of the monthly ad spend.

No … not at all. They need to be optimized DAILY (as we do for all our clients)! Your campaigns need to be managed and optimized regularly to make them work better over time and allow you to grow.

This involves creating new ad groups and keywords, pausing ads or keywords that aren’t working, adding negative or “bad” keywords making suggestions about new campaigns, checking if the budget is adequate and making suggestions around where to increase it, ensuring your ads aren’t being shown for irrelevant keywords and LOTS more!

Maybe, but probably not if they are reputable.

You may not be entering the keywords that have been set up in your account, you may find your budget isn’t enough to reach all searchers, or your "quality score" is lower due to your website, so your ad doesn’t get shown all the time. It may be the advertiser has excluded your internal computer address to improve campaign performance, or it's not targeting people in the location you are in.

Because we truly believe we can run an account better than ANY other marketing company!

Arrogance aside … Google / Bing Ads are a great revenue generator for marketing companies who like to do some setup work upfront but then do little else throughout the month. Meanwhile, they’re still collecting their management fee, and your results are suffering. We see it all the time!

Likewise, having Google or Bing reps run your ads is also a recipe for disaster. When you call them, you are unlikely going to get the same person, so they are not going to be familiar with your unique needs. Something else worth thinking about is that they’re working for the very same company that you’re paying the ad spend to, and their goal is, of course, to get you to spend as much as possible.

There are many ways agencies charge for ads management:

• Percentage of ad spend (usually subject to a minimum)
• Depending on number of campaigns and ad groups
• Fixed fee plus percentage of spend
• Fixed fee per month
• Big setup fee and a one of the above

Personally, we find the percentage-of-spend model to be a tad unethical. It doesn’t really provide the agency much incentive to lower your ad spend. The more you spend with Google, the more the agency gets paid.

We charge a flat fee based on the complexity/size of the ad account(s) we are running. We also don’t charge a setup fee and don’t hold our clients to long-term contracts.