AdWords vs. SEO – Which is the Best for Your Marketing
The aim for any website is to get good leads and the way of achieving this by letting the prospective customers see that you exist. When marketing and promoting the services, getting a good rank on Google is one of the prime challenges faced by a business. The most frequently asked question in this regard is whether you should pay for advertising through Google AdWords or put more efforts and play long term with organic SEO.
Two of the main components of Search Engine Marketing are AdWords and SEO and these come in as super handy tools when you are trying to run digital marketing campaigns. Now, the fact is that both AdWords and SEO have their own advantages and they are similar is as many ways as they are different. You can use them separately or together depending on the marketing goals of your business. Let’s first delve into the basics of these two tools before going into the comparisons.
The Basic Ideas about Google Adwords and SEO
Google AdWords: Google AdWords is one of the advertising platforms under Google and it is better known and among the biggest players in the game of online marketing. It works on a pay per click basis which means that you will be charged each time someone goes to your advertisement. The marketers can utilize this platform for positioning the ads in the Google products, Search Result Pages, and to multiple other sites that have their participation in AdWords as publishers. Think of AdWords as this big auction house where the marketers compete for the present advert prices.
Search Engine Optimization: SEO is all about getting better ranks in the Search Engine Results Pages (Search Engine Results Pages) of Yahoo, Bing, Google, and other such important search engines. For SEO to work, you need to ensure that the website is search engine friendly. The website which is SEO enabled can be found easily by all the search engines and accessed with ease by the viewers.
Choosing the Best Option for Your Marketing
There are basically two facets to consider when making a decision between choosing AdWords or SEO for the marketing purposes of your business.
All new ventures begin with AdWords
The business owners of today look for results faster and this is where the benefits of AdWords come into play. The biggest plus that AdWords has over SEO is that the results are generated much faster. Surely, you will need to pay up for each visit you receive from AdWords but if the campaign turns out to be profitable for you, it can always be adjusted through the investments in Pay Per Click and thus, meet the objectives of your business.
AdWords is great for the startups and the new companies that are looking to achieve that targeted traffic faster for making sales, getting new visitors, testing the products, site effectiveness, procedures, and all other components in their marketing or sales process.
The greatest benefit of pay per click is that you get to control the terms that a website is listed for. It is highly useful while trying to determine the keyword terms that bring the best results. AdWords make it easy for you to understand the keywords that convert into more visitors for your site. This is beneficial for both new and established businesses.
While the profitability of AdWords is quite evident, the fact is that you will have to use it carefully and wisely. Before spending all the bucks on AdWords, you will have to consider the control and monitoring tools as otherwise you will only get losses in place of the profits that you hoped for. Using AdWords before properly understanding the tricks of the trade is like playing in a Casino with the hopes that someday you will win it all back but you never actually will!
The system is undoubtedly easy to utilize but at the same time, you need to have that much-needed experience and knowledge to excel in running the AdWords campaigns. Otherwise, it is better to save up your money and get the professionals to do it for you. Running the campaign by professionals is the best approach because then, instead of losing money, you start benefiting from using AdWords. However, hiring the professionals also comes with its own warnings. You will still need to have a certain level of understanding about the matter or else you will be facing ad frauds whereby you end up paying more than the service that you are getting.
Not to Forget About the Advantages of SEO
It is always a good idea to begin with AdWords because of the speed of the results but that in no way means that you forget all about SEO, social media, and content marketing for getting the results. Your long term online success depends on the proper usage of these three techniques.
Content marketing lets you create the proper content and SEO helps in optimizing the content for the search engine pages and thus get a higher number of organic traffic. Social media promotes that SEO optimized content to ensure that it reaches a wider audience.
One of the other major advantages for SEO ranks is that they are trusted more by the viewers compared to the advertisements. Google has been here for a long enough time for people to understand that something is being advertised to them. Thus, for any business it leaves no option to depend solely on Google AdWords. SEO takes a lot more patience, focus, and focus but after you have got your site successfully established, your business will grow naturally through trust and merit.
About Using SEO and Adwords at the Same Time
The common notion is that when you use SEO to get traffic, there is no need to get into using AdWords but this idea is as wrong as it gets. Even after having good ranking, the AdWords can still be used for getting a higher level of exposure for the keywords through which you get SEO traffic. You can understand the performance of the AdWords campaigns and if they turn out to be more profitable, then you can also increase the budget to ensure a greater return on investment.
SEO vs. AdWords: A Comparison
Now that you have a basic idea about SEO and AdWords, let’s get into a brief comparison between the two.
The Application: AdWords is for the Google sites that use Google Adsense but SEO principles work for every search engine.
The Price Considerations: The traffic that you get from AdWords is paid while the ones that you get from SEO come free.
The Position on Search Engine Pages: AdWords come on the bottom and top of Google’s search results and only in certain cases you get to reach those positions, but in case of SEO, there is much more hard work involved in getting the topmost positions in organic search results.
The Time Factor: AdWords provides more immediate results compared to SEO because the marketing campaigns are created instantly and they begin to get targeted traffic but with SEO you will need more time to achieve good traffic and rankings and it takes more time for websites new in the market.
Calculation Of ROI: The calculation of return on investments is easier with AdWords but with SEO it tends to get difficult as multiple factors come into play and it is not just about money spent on ads and revenue earned.
Long-term Considerations: The moment you stop the AdWords campaign, the traffic will also stop coming but if you start receiving organic traffic through SEO, it will go on for long-term.
Using Keywords : You get to target multiple keywords at one point in time with AdWords, but in terms of SEO, it is best to focus on few specific keywords for getting the best results.
Advertising on Websites: The AdWords let you advertise on other such Google sites and those websites that utilize Google Adsense but results that you get from SEO are only present for the search engine result pages.
Picking the Best Out Of the Two Tools
The answer to which tool is the best among the AdWords and SEO is pretty simple: it is both. Organic ranking through SEO gives a business some trust, authority and long term results while the paid ads give an immediate high rank and higher visibility. Leverage AdWords to get more traffic and at the same time work on the SEO, social media campaigns, and content marketing strategies to make sure that you can access organic traffic and also visit from the social networks.
SEO and AdWords are not really competitors that you will have to choose one among the two. They are both powerful tools to have in your online marketing arsenal. You can utilize AdWords when looking to get traffic faster but SEO is something you need for long term success and to sustain in this highly competitive digital world.
Author: Amara Luis
Amara Luis is a skilled and most creative content writer work freelance specializing in writing SEO, social media and other various topic on internet marketing.
