A long time ago (12 years ago in fact) when you wanted to advertise your portable toilet services you'd simply pay $20-$200 per listing in the Yellow Pages depending on what size/feature your ad was. And that was basically it, you relied on word of mouth and the bottle neck that was the Yellow Pages for new customers, you didn't need a website or anything of the sort. Once people started to realize that they could find services online things changed.
We were among the first to get a website / web page listing in the late 1990's, back then nearly everyone who searched portable toilets came to our little website there was little other choice (nobody else had a website). We thought this is great, we can advertise our services for free and get a bunch of new clients, this strategy worked quite well for a while. Having taken a HTML class in high school I cheated and put a bunch of keywords in hidden text to rank higher in search results (this strategy doesn't work anymore). But in the mid 2000's everyone else started to realize the that the internet is really important to getting them new clients.
What has happened is that large companies will pay SEO specialists thousands of dollars to get their page at the top of page 1 and the smaller/poorer companies can only watch as their customer stream dries up. So instead of paying just a few bucks a month for ads your paying hundreds & thousands for it. There really is nothing you can do to stop it, the best course of action is to spend a few weeks learning SEO (search engine optimization), though the specialists are good nothing beats a sheer passion for promoting your business and products.
Ever search for portable toilets in your area? You'll undoubtedly notice many companies or sites that you've never heard of before and that don't really offer services to your area but still advertise portable toilet quotes. These are direct service companies (middle men). What they do is take new customer quotes/calls, arrange for one of the local companies to deliver a portable toilet and charge the customer directly (with a little extra fee on top of your charges of course). In my opinion they're vultures who know the ins and outs of website design and SEO and take advantage of that fact to steal business from local portable toilet service providers. We know because we ourselves work with one of them, it's provided a few clients for us and since we charge the same rates we tolerate it (I wish I had em all actually). One thing about working with direct service companies is that they pay on time and deal with the potential headache a customer can be. But for those of you who don't work with them it's simply another competitor, even worst a competitor that has better advertising, gets more customers than you yet almost does nothing while you clean up people's bathrooms.
In conclusion, times have changed and unfortunately not all for the better, while Google and other search engines are very popular now for people who are searching for your services, it's now very VERY time consuming, competitive, and potentially very pricey to get your portable toilet rental company advertised online.
We were among the first to get a website / web page listing in the late 1990's, back then nearly everyone who searched portable toilets came to our little website there was little other choice (nobody else had a website). We thought this is great, we can advertise our services for free and get a bunch of new clients, this strategy worked quite well for a while. Having taken a HTML class in high school I cheated and put a bunch of keywords in hidden text to rank higher in search results (this strategy doesn't work anymore). But in the mid 2000's everyone else started to realize the that the internet is really important to getting them new clients.
What has happened is that large companies will pay SEO specialists thousands of dollars to get their page at the top of page 1 and the smaller/poorer companies can only watch as their customer stream dries up. So instead of paying just a few bucks a month for ads your paying hundreds & thousands for it. There really is nothing you can do to stop it, the best course of action is to spend a few weeks learning SEO (search engine optimization), though the specialists are good nothing beats a sheer passion for promoting your business and products.
Ever search for portable toilets in your area? You'll undoubtedly notice many companies or sites that you've never heard of before and that don't really offer services to your area but still advertise portable toilet quotes. These are direct service companies (middle men). What they do is take new customer quotes/calls, arrange for one of the local companies to deliver a portable toilet and charge the customer directly (with a little extra fee on top of your charges of course). In my opinion they're vultures who know the ins and outs of website design and SEO and take advantage of that fact to steal business from local portable toilet service providers. We know because we ourselves work with one of them, it's provided a few clients for us and since we charge the same rates we tolerate it (I wish I had em all actually). One thing about working with direct service companies is that they pay on time and deal with the potential headache a customer can be. But for those of you who don't work with them it's simply another competitor, even worst a competitor that has better advertising, gets more customers than you yet almost does nothing while you clean up people's bathrooms.
In conclusion, times have changed and unfortunately not all for the better, while Google and other search engines are very popular now for people who are searching for your services, it's now very VERY time consuming, competitive, and potentially very pricey to get your portable toilet rental company advertised online.
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