A recent survey of 288 SEO’s and Small Businesses dug in to try to determine what marketing venue offered the best ROI for local businesses.  The surveyed represented over 7,000 locations in a one year period and can be learned about in more detail in the link above.

The survey showed that organic search delivered the most visits to the site and phone calls, followed by the Google+ for business page, which is actually typically considered a part of any good local SEO plan as the strength of the Google page is highly dependent on the strength of your site.

As I mentioned, the article has more detail, but below is the order in which venues finished.  Showing the importance of search is that Google Adwords comes in 4th, stressing the need or at least usefulness of a comprehensive search strategy. Facebook and Twitter actually showed fairly low ROI in the survey.  Here is the top 10 in order of finish.

  1. Organic Search
  2. Google+ Local
  3. Direct Traffic (those that already know you)
  4. Google Adwords
  5. Email Marketing
  6. Referral Traffic
  7. Bing Local/Yahoo Local
  8. Mobile Marketing
  9. Facebook
  10. Bing Ads

Now of course every business should be approached with a unique and custom approach to their marketing needs and I’ve definitely seen businesses where Facebook was a great source of business, but looking at the overall data, it seems every local business owner has to take a look at some sort of search strategy.  Give us a call if you want some help in putting together a plan for your business.

Summary
Article Name
SEO has highest ROI for Local Businesses
Google Certified Partner and SEM Specialist
A recent survey of SEO's and small businesses concluded that SEO has the best ROI for local businesses.
Jeremy Skillings