We use both of them. You use one of them every day and its probably not full of whipped cream and vanilla! I don’t want to sound like any of hundreds of blogs rapping on google, but if you are a small business, there is no getting around the huge impact the search engine has on your lead generation and budget. Yeah, there’s a big difference between Pay-per-click budgets and that $4.50 Coffee Frappucino.
Both companies are dominant #1 in their industry. At least with Starbucks, you have alternatives for your Morning Joe. Bing, Facebook and Yahoo are not significant alternatives for finding local companies online. Starbucks has Baristas to place your order with, talk to and smile back with a graceful “Thank-you!” Google has no baristas. Better talk to Rich and Baseline Marketing? How about at the Starbucks on Connecticut Avenue?
When you use Google to search for anything from financial information to local weather, you’re given a list of search results generated by Google’s algorithm. The algorithm attempts displaying the most relevant results for your query, and with those results, you are fed related suggested pages from an AdWords advertiser.
Any recommended websites you see when logged into Gmail, YouTube, Maps, and other Google sites are generated through the AdWords platform.
To gain the top placement in Google ads, advertisers need to outbid each other. Higher bids move up the list while the low bid ends up unviewed and buried. Ok, you know all that!
Advertisers pay Google each time a visitor clicks on an advertisement. A click may be worth anywhere from $12 for “Garage Door Repair Rockville MD” to $14 for “Bethesda MD Plastic Surgeon (really… what a bargain!) to over $50 for highly competitive search terms, including “insurance”, “Attorney Washington DC” and financial services. It’s a whole lot less complicated to order a Grande Iced Skinny Cinnamon Latte! But I digress….
We use credit cards for both companies but we don’t need an SEM/PPC Search Engine Marketing/Pay-Per-Click specialist to place an order for Nitro Cold Brew. Your local Starbucks is easy to approach: just drive up and place your order. Local search via Google can be a minefield of waste and budget destruction.
The online environment is a struggle, a fight, a war against larger competitors and fraudulent outsiders posing as authoritative, local businesses for your sales prospects to call on their smart phones. Nothing is easy today. Except ordering a cup of coffee! What do you think? …extra cream and sugar?
