Many plumbers swear by their PPC company, while others complain of lackluster results. No matter what sort of strategy you have in play for pay-per-click, there’s a chance you’ve been missing out on valuable business opportunities. This week, Nolen and Jason discuss the real story of a seasoned plumber who grew disillusioned with their PPC company. Be sure to listen closely if your campaigns have started to stagnate!

Key Points to Listen For

* PPC offers dependable, but frequently diminishing returns for businesses.

* PPC companies generally have no incentive to improve your organic SEO efforts.

* Paid ads work best when partnered with a solid plumbing SEO foundation.

The Story of Pay-Per-Click Bob

Recently our team at the Plumbing Webmasters received a call from a frustrated plumber in the Northeast. His name was Bob, and you could hear the subtle, but certain anger in his voice. Bob’s business has supported his local community (a sizeable metropolitan area) for over a decade. He has very little discernible organic presence online. Instead, he pays a PPC company to run his online advertising for him, primarily out of Google Ads.

Here’s the kicker: Bob pays up to $12,000 a month for his PPC work.

To be fair, Bob informed us that the advertisements from the PPC company are producing very consistent results each month. However, the prices of his keywords seem to be rising (sometimes going as high as $100 per click). He also noticed that the rate of return for his PPC efforts also seem to be slowly dropping each month. Any plumber finding themselves in the same situation would have real cause for concern, so we agreed to take a look at his website analytics.

A Disappointing Situation

We found Bob had more reasons to be disappointed in his PPC company than he realized. They had almost completely neglected his website, diverting all their attention to managing the pay-per-click campaigns. The PPC ads simply directed Google Search users to custom landing pages, which didn’t really help the rest of his site metrics. Granted, the advertising efforts seemed to be producing real business for Bob’s plumbing business, but even those returns were diminishing.

Since Bob had been in business for so long, any sort of organic plumbing SEO on this marketing team’s part could have produced some outstanding results and cut down his monthly costs. But our findings clearly indicated that was not a priority to this PPC company. What was the ultimate summary of our analysis?

Bob was missing out on serious lead opportunities, and (quite literally) paying for it.

Key Lessons for Your Marketing

First of all, we need to make something clear. Bob isn’t a bad guy. His PPC company isn’t evil, but there is widening gap between Bob’s potential growth and where he is now. Let’s explore some facts that could help explain this situation.

Be sure to read closely if Bob’s situation feels all to similar to your plumbing SEO situation!

Lesson #1: PPC Isn’t the Problem…

Advertising gets results. While it may not produce the long-term results and branding benefits of SEO for plumbers, PPC offers fairly consistent results. The reason Bob continues to spend thousands of dollars every month is that he can easily see their return.

When it comes to PPC platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads, accountability plays an instrumental part in their success. Every campaign operates on a set budget, geographical area, and a target market. SEO rarely offers such precision,