Google Advertising and Bing: Our Experiences and Why You Should Choose SEO Instead
Many people are therefore considering starting with Google advertising or advertising on Bing to secure a place at the very top of the search results. When you want more inquiries for your business, visibility in the search engines is absolutely crucial.
Through our experience in the industry, we have learned a lot about what works – and not least what costs more than it tastes. Although we at Hjemmesiden.no know the advertising platforms inside and out, we have chosen to specialize in search engine optimization (SEO) rather than selling advertising services. Here we share our honest experiences about how search engine advertising works, and why we think SEO is a far better investment for your business.
The truth about Google advertising: Expensive, time-consuming, and low conversions
Google advertising is often sold as a magic solution to getting to the top of the search results. The reality for most small and medium-sized businesses is quite different:
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High cost per click: Competition has pushed prices up. It is not uncommon to pay around 10 kroner just for someone to click log into your website.
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Low conversion rate: Experience shows that these expensive clicks rarely lead to actual sales or inquiries. The money quickly disappears out the window.
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Difficult to hit the target: Setting up campaigns that actually reach the right target audience is enormously time-consuming and technically demanding.
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Bad and salesy customer service: If you have a problem and contact Google's customer support via form, it often takes a long time to get a response. When they do respond, they often seem more interested in selling you new features and increasing your budget than actually solving your problem.
Our advice to you must use Google Ads: Don't blindly trust Google's algorithms. My impression is that the platform is more concerned with maximizing its own earnings than ensuring the best interests of the customer. I recently spoke to an industry colleague who said that he deliberately does this opposite of what the automatic suggestions in Google Ads recommend. If you are going to advertise here, we strongly recommend using manual bidding so that you retain control of your own money.
We recommend dynamic search campaigns where you add headlines that contain the keywords. Add images, sitelinks and structured snippets. In addition, you should add your company logo and verify your company name. You can increase your bidding for specific groups, such as those who live in the local area. Once the campaign is set up in Google Ads, it is easy to sync it with Microsoft Ads so you can run the same ads on Bing.
Facebook Ads: Tireless customer service and the wrong target audience
Social media is another popular channel for digital advertising, but our experiences with Meta (Facebook and Instagram) are far from positive:
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You end up paying for the wrong audience: If you’re not extremely careful about setting strict age, demographic, and geographic limits, Facebook’s algorithms will often show your ads primarily to seniors, which may result in lots of «likes» but rarely paying customers for your business.
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Frustrating customer support: Facebook Ads customer service is perceived as very poor. Support is usually based abroad, and chatting with them is extremely time-consuming. They tend to ask an endless series of standardized questions that rarely lead to an actual solution to your problem.
Why SEO is the smart investment
When you pay for ads, you are simply «renting» the traffic. The day you turn off your advertising budget, your customers disappear overnight. Google and Facebook make money, while your business is left empty-handed.
We therefore recommend all our clients to invest their marketing budget in search engine optimization (SEO).
Instead of paying 10 kroner per click forever, we build your website so that it ranks organically and naturally on Google. This requires effort at the beginning (through lightning-fast websites, technical SEO and solid content), but once you have captured a top position, the traffic is free and permanent. Customers also trust the organic search results much more than the paid ads.
Are you tired of throwing money at Google and Facebook?
Contact us at Hjemmesiden.no. We will help you build a website and an SEO strategy that will get you customers over time, without expensive advertising costs. We have 100% satisfaction guarantee and best price guarantee.