These days, the vast majority of people will encounter your business for the first time via a search engine – making search engine optimization (SEO) one of the most crucial parts of any digital marketing campaign. This is especially true for service-based organizations like pet spas who tend to compete for the same limited audience as many other businesses.
But for as effective as organic search is, it’s also just one small part of a much larger story. Equally important are things like paid search, with Google Ads being a top example. By learning more about paid search best practices for pet spas, you can better position your own business for success.
What is Paid Search Advertising?
Paid search advertising is exactly what it sounds like: any type of digital marketing that you pay for, typically involving prominent placement on the search engine results pages (SERPs). The intention is to get your pet spa ranking as highly for relevant keywords as possible, thus driving more traffic to your website.
According to one recent study, for every $1 that a business like a pet spa spends on paid marketing, they tend to make approximately $2 in return. If the average pay-per-click campaign costs approximately $9,000 to $10,000 for small to mid-sized businesses, that means they can reasonably expect to double that in terms of ROI.
The major benefit of running paid search ads on an engine like Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other ultimately comes down to visibility. According to another recent study, approximately 8.5 billion searches happen on Google alone every single day. Is your pet spa’s paid search ad going to appear alongside every one of them? No – but if you target your keywords properly, you could reach a potentially major audience that you might otherwise not have access to.
In terms of budgeting, paid search is also predictable by its very nature. With pay-per-click ads, you’re only paying when someone actually clicks on the ad you’re running – not every time they see it. You can set a particular budget and have a tool like Google Ads take care of the rest.
In a larger sense, the key to leveraging paid search ads to your advantage involves learning more about what they are and how they operate. There are a few key elements you’ll need to be aware of, including:
- The headline. This is the largest text in the ad and is thus the first thing that someone is likely to notice during a Google search. This is where you would want to include text like “pet spa in [LOCATION]” to instantly confirm to someone that they’re in the right place.
- The display URL. This shows the website address directly below the headline. This is where someone will go when they click the ad, which is usually to some part of your website or to a landing page. This can be up to 35 characters in length.
- The description text. This is your opportunity to highlight some of the most important details about your pet spa in a way that convinces people to click through to your larger website. If there is some type of unique competitive advantage you have that other pet spas don’t, this is where you would want to call it out.
- Ad extensions. Google in particular allows you to use ad extensions to help increase your paid search ad rank, improve your click-through rate, and more.
Paid search best practices for pet shops involve making each of these elements as specific as possible for the audience you’re speaking to.
Benefits of Paid Search Ads
For most businesses and certainly for service-based organizations like pet spas, the biggest benefit of paid search ads will be the increased visibility in local searches that comes with it.
Again, billions of searches are conducted on a site like Google every day – but that ultimately doesn’t do your pet spa any good because your audience is not literally billions of people. You’re targeting people who live in a very specific geographic area. Local search engine optimization is all about getting your content in front of those people, and it’s incredibly effective with what happens next.
According to another recent study, about 46% of all searches on Google have some type of local intent. Someone isn’t just searching for “pet spa.” They’re searching for “pet spa near me.” Not only does some type of purchase tend to result from 28% of all local searches, but most of them happen within just 24 hours.
In other words, if someone is searching for a pet spa in their area with a sense of urgency and your paid search ad is the first thing they see, you’re dramatically increasing the chances that the first number they call is yours.
Note that this also leads to an increase in traffic to your pet spa’s website, the importance of which cannot be overstated. What happens if they don’t have a sense of urgency and are just looking around for their options so that when they are ready to take their pet to a spa, they know where to go? Paid search still leads to more website traffic, which is again critical.
This is also part of the reason why you should create location-specific service pages for every area that you operate in. Even if you only have one location but are surrounded by five cities, create pages that target each of those areas and run ads for all of them. That increased bump in traffic will absolutely raise awareness and people won’t forget you when they need a pet spa in the future.
Not only does paid search tend to increase the number of leads that you’re working with, but it also tends to result in higher quality leads as well. The types of leads that result from paid search ads tend to be highly interested prospects. They’re not searching or general information when they’re looking for a services business like yours. They know what type of problem they have, and they’re looking for a solution like the one you offer – they just need to find the right one.
Therefore, they don’t need to be “warmed up” quite as much as someone who was coming in totally cold would be. They’re already farther along the sales funnel than they otherwise would be, increasing not just traffic but the number of purchases that result from that traffic, too.
Finally, another significant benefit of paid search ads for pet spas has to do with the detailed analytics that you can employ moving forward.
In marketing, there’s an old saying that reminds us how you can’t improve what you’re not measuring and paid search analytics let you measure and track just about everything. Once your campaign begins to run and ad impressions start to roll in, you’ll see where your most popular geographic areas are, for example. You never know – your pet spa may be popular in areas that you hadn’t even considered in the past. This can highlight a market that you should be more aggressively targeting.
Paid search analytics can also tell you things like:
- What type of device someone was using when they performed the search that let them see and click on your ad. That way, you can make sure that your ads display well on all devices.
- What pages someone visited when they went to your site. This could be a great indication of which of your pet spa’s services are especially popular with an audience.
- How much time someone spent on your site. If someone clicks on your ad, visits your site, and navigates away almost immediately without doing anything, you’re still paying for that impression. If this number isn’t high, you know you have a problem on your hands and can now start to experiment with how to fix it.
Overall, these analytics give you the insight you need to see which of your pet spa marketing efforts are working and, more importantly, which ones aren’t. That way, you know where to focus your attention for improvement.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
While business intelligence marketing software can be hugely beneficial to service-based businesses like pet spas in particular, it can also be prohibitively expensive. Working with an agency can also be a big cost that is far too much for some smaller organizations to deal with.
At Surefire Local, we want you to have access to all the opportunities these techniques bring with them at a fraction of the cost you would normally pay. We do this by way of our innovative business intelligence marketing software that allows you to manage all the most important online marketing activities you’re involved with from a simple, easy-to-use platform.
That platform acts as a “single source of truth” for your pet spa, allowing you to make sure that your marketing is every bit as effective as you need it to be. To find out more information, or to schedule a demonstration so that you can see what the platform can do for you, click here to contact Surefire Local today.