ID-606-Brett Trembly

Q: As a litigation firm, we have big downtown firms that spend thousands of dollars on SEO. For a small firm competing with a large firm, I don’t think it’s cost effective. How much do you think SEO is effective for small businesses and small firms, and how do you sort of mesh that with a pay-per-click campaign so you can properly track both?
A: Pay-per-click and SEO are completely different marketing methods. Both are important, both can bring results. If anyone is interested in SEO and wants to make sure they kick things off properly with SEO, I would recommend you do pay-per-click. With pay-per-click, I wouldn’t even do it unless I could allocate about $3,000 a month to it. There are statistics and information you would get doing pay-per-click from paying Google that you cannot get without paying Google for pay-per-click. You’re going to get proper metrics that will help you define the proper keywords, that are buying keywords, and you can use those for SEO very effectively. Having said that, pay-per-click can be very trick and if you are not doing it with a professional who really knows what they’re doing then you can lose money with pay-per-click. Again, I wouldn’t do pay-per-click unless I had someone that was managing that for me. An important thing to point out is that when you are competing against a larger firm that does have more money to go to market, they can beat you in a lot of areas. They can outspend you with SEO and pay-per-click. However, pay-per-click does give you an opportunity to get leads because in most cases they’re not going to spend all the money to take all the spots in pay-per-click. Here’s the thing, most large firms are slow to move. They’re slow to move into action and try something new. You have a great opportunity with reputation marketing to beat them without going head to head in SEO or pay-per-click.