In a previous blog article, we explored some of the main ways you can leverage digital marketing to grow your dog training business. Globally, the average person spends several hours per day on their mobile phone – creating an abundance of opportunities for businesses, and an intense fight to capture the ever-decreasing attention spans of potential customers.
While social media is one way to promote your business, it’s unlikely that posts on Facebook and Instagram alone will be enough to grow your business in the long run. This approach makes you vulnerable to social media platform changes that might mean your posts aren’t seen by the majority of users, or may require you to invest in paid social media advertising to continue building an audience. Instead, online strategies for growth are usually based around Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Paid Advertising on search engines. Many online gurus (typically with a vested interest in selling you their services) will suggest going all-in on one of these channels, but the reality is that every successful business may need to deploy both when necessary. This article provides an overview of SEO and Paid Advertising, and explains how your dog training business can use them to achieve your goals.
Article Contents
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the science of optimizing your website from a technical and creative standpoint to ensure it has the best possible chance of ranking on internet search engines for terms your target audience is searching for. When you perform a search on Google, the order in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) isn’t random – instead, they are ranked based on what Google determines to be the most relevant content to match the search term. Google and other search engines ‘crawl’ websites frequently. Proprietary algorithms help to determine which websites best serve the intent of the search being performed, and that is how the rankings are established.
What is Paid Advertising?
Paid Advertising on search engines enables businesses to ‘pay-to-play’ – essentially, when a search is performed on a search engine, the business will appear at the top of the results (typically denoted with a small ‘Sponsored’ tag). Businesses pay money to appear for certain search terms. The cost is usually based on a cost-per-click (CPC) where the user is charged each time the Ad is clicked, or cost-per-impression, where the user is charged after the Ad is seen a certain number of times. With Paid Advertising, the results can be almost instantaneous, although inefficient campaigns (for example, targeting the wrong audience or keywords) and fierce competition can cause costs to spiral.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of SEO?
There are benefits and drawbacks to investing in SEO. Results will certainly take longer to achieve than Paid Advertising, so it isn’t a quick fix by any means. There is also a misconception that SEO generates ‘free’ traffic, but typically a business has made some type of investment (either a monetary investment by paying an agency or freelancer, or a time investment by handling it internally) to achieve any kind of strong SEO performance.
Advantages of SEO
- Builds credibility and trust. Ranking prominently in search engine results is a sign of confidence that your content is trustworthy and authoritative. With high-quality content on your website, it increases the chances that customers will visit again and again, and in turn increases the chances they can become paying customers.
- Higher conversion rates. Many users have become conditioned to scrolling past the first few results on search engines, understanding that these are websites who are paying to be there (denoted by the ‘Sponsored’ label). Instead, performing well in organic results increases click-through rates (CTR) and makes it more likely that users will actually convert once they land on your website.
- Expand your reach with informational content. Dog owners have hundreds of questions about their dog’s behavior. Writing informative blogs to answer those questions can help your brand to appear in front of potential customers every single day.
- Appear in local searches. Optimizing your Google Business Profile (GBP) can enable you to appear in the Map Pack when a user searches for dog training services in your area.
- A cost-effective way to grow in the long-term. Remember, we said previously that SEO isn’t free – but your investment can reap dividends when traffic continues to visit your site on a consistent basis. There is no ongoing Ad spend, so maintaining a strong SEO presence in the long run is a cost-effective way to generate traffic.
Disadvantages of SEO
- It takes time to see results. There’s no doubt that SEO can take time before you’ll see success – it will likely be months for a new website to become established and begin to generate organic traffic. You will need to be patient and have a long-term mindset for this to be successful.
- Organic competitors are trying to outrank you. Whether you like it or not, SEO is a game you are playing with your competitors. If they’re savvy, they will be doing the same things that you are doing, and attempting to make their website as attractive as possible to users and search engines. In a competitive field like dog training, it can be tough to establish a strong presence.
- Algorithm changes can cause unpredictability. Search engines are constantly refining their algorithms to help better serve their users. This can cause unexpected changes in organic traffic levels, even though nothing has actually changed on your website.
- Requires ongoing work to be successful. SEO isn’t a one-time thing – it requires ongoing work to adapt to algorithm changes and continue to grow your site. As with many things in life, if your SEO strategy stands still, you can guarantee that there are others who will be walking or even running ahead of you.
What dog trainers need to know about SEO
Every business has an SEO strategy – even if they don’t know what it is themselves. If you don’t have a website, that is a strategic choice, and is a missed opportunity to get your brand in front of your potential client base. If you have a website but only update it infrequently, that is also a strategic choice – to neglect the chance to build on your existing presence and expand your reach. Many businesses – particularly busy dog trainers who may be more worried about working with dogs than keeping their website updated – don’t have the capacity to improve their SEO aside from the bare minimum. But this creates an opportunity for the dog training business that can find a way to put an effective SEO strategy in place.
Remember that SEO is an investment. If you are doing it yourself, you are investing your time and effort. If you work with an agency or freelancer, you are investing your money. Whichever way you cut it, SEO isn’t free. Furthermore, outsourcing to a cheap SEO provider (such as many of those found on sites like Fiverr) can often cause more problems than it solves, because they often engage in shady or unethical tactics (known as ‘black hat’ SEO) that can harm your website in the long run by eroding trust and credibility.
SEO is a long-term game, and you have to be committed. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. If you choose to work with an external agency, do your due diligence and ask for case studies. Make sure to ask the right questions. It always makes sense to get a fundamental understanding of how SEO works (which is why we cover this as part of our curriculum in our programs at the School for Dog Trainers), because it enables you to know if a provider is being truthful and can be trusted. In the same way that you may not know how to do your taxes, but you should know enough to ask your tax professional the key questions that are applicable to your situation, it’s the same with SEO.
Perhaps the most common reason that businesses do not see success with SEO is impatience. It takes time for search engines to crawl your site. It takes time for your investment to pay off in traffic and conversions. Chopping and changing your website design every week in search of those elusive rankings isn’t going to work. You can add new content to help feed your website, particularly if that is in the form of informational content – but resist the temptation to make sweeping changes because you aren’t seeing immediate results. That will only prolong the time it will take for your site to be successful.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of Paid Advertising?
As with SEO, there are positives and negatives associated with spending money on online advertising. A thoughtful and effective Paid campaign can garner immediate results, but it comes at a price – literally. In addition, increasing costs associated with Paid advertising, combined with the potential to burn through a budget due to poor or ineffective audience targeting, can prove expensive.
Advantages of Paid Advertising
- Immediate results. While SEO can take some time to see results, Paid Advertising can be far quicker. As soon as your campaign goes live, there is the potential to see immediate RoI.
- Audience targeting. Paid Advertising allows you to target individuals in different cross-sections of society, meaning you can tailor your Ads to your target audience. You can refine your targeting by demographics, location, hobbies and interests, and more.
- Measurable performance. With tracking set up correctly, it is far simpler to spot the correlation between Ad spend and conversions. For example, you will be able to precisely identify which keywords are most effective for your campaigns.
- Scalability. As you begin to see results from your campaigns, you can then re-invest the revenue into continuing to push Ads.
- Increased brand visibility. As Paid Advertising features prominently in SERPs, your brand often has greater visibility and name recognition.
Disadvantages of Paid Advertising
- Ongoing costs. If you’re solely reliant on Paid Advertising, you have to keep the taps on to continue generating new leads. This can make it difficult if your business doesn’t have a lot of spare financial capacity, or has to divert the advertising budget elsewhere in the business.
- It can be expensive. In addition to the fact that you have to keep ‘feeding the monster’, paid advertising can also be expensive. In competitive niches and locations, advertising costs can quickly be eaten up, meaning your budget doesn’t stretch as far.
- Complex management. For Paid Advertising to be successful, it requires careful management and optimization of the campaign. It isn’t just about picking the right keywords and choosing the right budget – other variables such as negative keywords (the keywords you don’t want to bid on, to protect your budget) and dayparting (the times and days of the week your Ad will be shown to users) play a role, too. This can result in a steep learning curve, and often results in wasted Ad budget for businesses who are unfamiliar with the process.
What dog trainers need to know about Paid Advertising
It goes without saying that burning through a Paid Advertising budget with poorly targeted campaigns is not a good idea for any business, including dog trainers. If your budget is smaller and you plan to run your own Ads, it is definitely worth taking a lot of time to invest in learning about them – there are courses available on platforms like HubSpot and Udemy, and you could also consider watching a YouTube tutorial series. If you have a bigger budget available, you may wish to find an agency or freelancer who can run the campaigns for you. As with choosing any vendor, make sure to ask the right questions and look for case studies. Remember that you will need to allocate money to pay the management fee to the agency, in addition to your Paid Advertising spend, which is usually a separate charge.
For newer Paid Advertising campaigns, it is best to start off slowly and refine your campaigns once you have data points available. This data is valuable for learning how your Ads are performing with certain segments of your audience, and which keywords are resonating (and, conversely, which are not). From there, you can refine the campaigns and Ad spend accordingly. It will be a constantly evolving process, but you want to give campaigns enough time to understand if they are actually performing well.
Paid Advertising can definitely play a role in your overall digital marketing efforts, although becoming too reliant on them can become restrictive as Ad costs continue to rise. They are particularly useful when first establishing a brand to achieve instant visibility and recognition, and can also be used to generate leads while SEO campaigns are in their early stages.
One option that dog trainers can consider for paid advertising is Google’s Local Service Ads program. This is far simpler than traditional search engine ads, which require creative (imagery/videos) and Ad copy. As opposed to being charged per click, businesses using the Local Service Ads program are only charged when a lead actually contacts them via phone or message. This can be a cost-effective way to dip your toe into the world of Paid Advertising, as you can set a monthly budget based on the number of leads you want to receive. Google estimates that leads for pet trainers typically cost between $25-$50 per lead. As with any type of paid advertising, however, Local Service Ads can be prone to varying lead quality, and strong performance is often linked to a high number of quality reviews, which can be challenging for new businesses.
It's not SEO vs. Paid Advertising - it's SEO and Paid Advertising, and how they can be used together for your business
There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to digital marketing – every dog training business is unique, with varying short and long-term goals, a range of service options, and different locations. Therefore, the key is to craft a digital marketing strategy that meets the needs of your business.
For example, a startup dog training business investing only in SEO runs the risk of low revenue generation, because SEO takes time to bring results. This could see the business fail before the SEO strategy has the chance to succeed. In this scenario, leaning on Paid Advertising may be the best way to generate clients in the interim, buying time for an SEO strategy to take effect.
Mature businesses have an advantage, because they already have an online presence and brand recognition. They can also look at historical data as pertains to web traffic and visibility to gauge what has worked in the past, and what needs to change in the future. A long-term perspective may be that continued investment in SEO (because it is more cost-effective, has higher conversion rates, and builds trust in your business), perhaps supplemented by Paid Advertising spend where necessary, is the most sustainable way to grow a business over several years.
The reality is, however, that what works for one business may not work for another. You know your business better than anybody – and you know which direction you want it to move towards in the future. So whether you outsource the work to an agency or take it on yourself, or whether you’re weighing up what your Paid Advertising budget should consist of versus your investment in SEO, take one lesson away from this article – do your research. Empower yourself with knowledge. Take the time to at least understand the fundamentals of SEO and Paid Advertising. You will be rewarded in the long-term with more informed, more effective decision making.
At the School for Dog Trainers, we’ve always placed an emphasis on not just how to train dogs, but how to run a successful dog training business. Our staff is comprised of former and current professional dog trainers, who offer their expertise to our students for the duration of our programs. Our post-graduation Alumni support means that our graduates always have support from a community of like-minded business owners and professionals. Many of our graduates have gone to set up their own successful dog training businesses – check out our Graduate Showcase series for more details.
If you want to kickstart your dog training career, contact us today for more information by emailing learntotraindogs@highlandcanine.com or calling toll-free on (800) 426-7412.