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SEO VS. Paid Placement For Your Construction Marketing Plan

construction marketing plan

Your construction marketing plan at work; one way (paid placement), clean and neat and trackable, the other, (SEO) a total disaster. 

SEO vs. Paid Placement

The argument for relying on these two types of marketing has as many detractors as they do champions, but this article is going to talk about efficiency.

You run a construction business, you barely have enough time in your day to order supplies for your next job much less sit around and read your Google analytics data. You need a program that works in a way that is trackable, manageable and efficient.

Before I start, let me say that there certainly is a place for SEO, but what I see all too often is contractors relying solely on SEO as a lead generation tool. Most of the time, that comes at the sacrifice of their website, their blog, their social media and their brand.

No one wants to see keyword-stuffed pages promoting “Philadelphia Plumbing Contractor Drain Cleaning” in their feeds. It all looks so spammy.

But you know where a headline like that works (with some tweaking)? In paid placement ads. More on that in a minute.

Let’s talk about the meat and potatoes of construction marketing plan development in terms of the fastest way to get to a conclusion.

Trackable: Let’s face it when it comes to tracking success, nothing beats paid placement. That could mean Google AdWords or Facebook advertising or anything really on the web. You have access to immediate statistical analysis to get at the only answer you need when it comes to advertising; did it work?

Manageable: All of the major platforms have apps you can download onto your phone so you can make adjustments, create new campaigns or pause campaigns on the fly. That means while you are sitting in traffic waiting for the light to change, you can turn on or off your current campaign and change your mind by the next traffic light.

Efficient: This is the big one, and the topic I will get into most detail on. SEO is messy. I mean, think about it. Most SEO’s worth their link will tell you they can barely keep up with the rapid changes in the industry.

Let’s correlate that for a second with a question. What if, when telling Mr. and Mrs. Jones about the deck you are going to build them, that you have no idea what color it is going to be, how big it is going to be, how many steps it may have, if it even has steps, or even if the thing is going to be standing when you are done. How confident in that would they be? Yet contractors big and small plunk down ten’s of thousands of dollars a month with the hope of being 1st on Google for their specific search term. That isn’t marketing, that’s praying.

Paid placement is so efficient, that you can setup a campaign and in an hour know if your product or service has any chance. If you don’t like the results, you can change your campaign and come back in an hour and get even more feedback. SEO takes weeks, months or even years. That’s not efficient at all, and can totally destroy your construction marketing plan. 

Again, SEO has a place, use SEO strategies for your blogging campaigns. Use hashtags for your social media strategy, and use storytelling for your email marketing. But when it comes to driving traffic you need today, nothing beats paid placement for construction marketing.

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