This is kind of debate for so long either to start SEO vs paid advertising for your online business. Some people will be saying to only take SEO as to market your online business. SEO has its own pros and cons over the paid advertising. On the other hand, some people say to go with paid advertising to guaranteed results. Being a business owner or entrepreneur, it becomes very confusing most of the time to choose the right path. Indeed, it is a tricky decision to choose between SEO vs paid advertising. Today, we shall see which one is better and hope the conclusion will be the one which is unexpected.
Before going into the findings, let’s look at the pros and cons of each technique of internet marketing. These details will leverage to look deep into SEO and paid advertising methodologies of internet marketing. I hope these details will help you better understand the facts about SEO vs paid advertising.
Paid advertising | At-large
We shall look at paid advertising first as it involves your money to get quick results. Yes, when you choose to go with paid advertising, your aim is to get quick traffic to your website or landing page. You pay to search engines like Google to pull your website or landing page in the top 3 results or at the side results, which appears in some countries like USA, UK, Canada and Australia in particular.
You select a keyword, then you create the copy of your Ad by adding a title and description and then add you’re the URL of your website or landing page. The final step is to bid to get your favourite position on the SERP of the search engine. The higher you bid the higher rank you get on the SERP.
But is it always good to go with the paid Ads for your website or landing page? Let’s investigate the benefits that you get from paid advertising on search engines.
Paid advertising to scale up quick
The first and foremost benefit of paid advertising is to get quick traffic. Yes, the very moment you start paying to search engine with the copy of your Ad, you will start getting traffic. It is all up to your budget if you are paying higher you are getting a higher position on the search engine and in the result, you shall be getting the traffic. What matters is the comparison between the clicks you are getting to be at top position as well as the number of searches a keyword hit in Google AdWords.
Paid advertising for targeted regions
The other beauty of paid advertising is that you can select your Ads to appear only and only in the regions you want to get traffic from. Let’s suppose you have an office in Quebec and you only want to get traffic from this state then you can select the region at the time of putting your Ad live. The benefit of taking the choice, you will not be getting traffic from any other region. This way you will be specific and only reaching to specific traffic.
Paid advertising for day partying
Day partying is kind of an interesting business term and maybe you are not familiar with the term. If you are doing a 0800am to 0500pm business and like to get phone calls during working hours, with paid advertising you can do this. There are websites which are ranking on the high positions but when a client like to approach them your office is closed or more likely there is no one to answer the questions of the customer. With paid advertising, you can choose to appear your ads during the desired business hours and not to spend money when you are not there to answer your customers.
Paid advertising for aggressive landing pages
A landing page is a web page on your website which is designed for a specific purpose or around a specific keyword. Most of the time landing pages are created around 2000 words which discuss many aspects of a keyword or a product or a service. With paid advertising, you don’t need to write content of 2000 words. As you are going to rank instantly very after paying to search engine, you can go with the catchiest content which can close the lead to customer. This is the most exciting aspect of paid advertising over SEO.
As we have detailed paid advertising in detail and have seen into the pros of paid advertising, let’s take a walk-through SEO and discuss its PLUS in detail.
SEO | At-large
Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is a strategy of getting “Free” traffic on the internet. This methodology is popular due to the fact that the outcome is dynamic. Like paid advertising, the outcome of SEO is not limited to one or two or three keywords. There are methods involve which can rank one landing page for a number of keywords; single word keyword, two and three-word keyword and long phrase keywords. Isn’t it interesting if one of your landing pages get ranked on the search engine for multiple keywords paying little attention? Furthermore, the efforts put to optimize a webpage or a website may pay you back for a very long time by not paying further attention. Let’s have look at the pros which tend businesses to adopt SEO as the source of internet marketing of your online business.
SEO for more traffic over time
The day you stop paying for paid advertisements you will not be getting any further traffic. on contrary, if you are getting less traffic at the start of your SEO processes but by keep putting consistent efforts SEO may get you more traffic over time. This traffic can be increased if you keep doing good SEO practices over time. This is a PLUS of SEO over paid advertising.
SEO traffic is FREE
In comparison to paid advertising, the SEO traffic is FREE. It doesn’t mean that the amount of SEO traffic is absolutely FREE. If you are paying $500 per month to get paid traffic it will be stopped if you don’t continue. But if you spend $500 per month to optimize your webpage and other optimization methods you will keep getting traffic even if you are not working anymore after getting a targeted position on SERP.
SEO gives higher CTR
CTR, click through rate, is one of the major factors that counts to calculate how good your marketing is paying you back. It is being observed since a long that fewer people click on the ads and more on organic ranking. Well if the trend remains the same, it can be considered that one-day search engines have to merge the paid listing into the organic results to get the clicks for their merchants. Adopting SEO methodology, a business can get higher CTR with a longtime ranking from search engines.
Which one is better SEO vs paid advertising?
As we have walked through both the methodologies, I will consider both for my business for the following reasons.
At the start of my business, as I am not so sure how much time it may take to rank my website, I will spend few of my budget to get the traffic and let people know about my product or service. For the purpose, I will take a few of my landing pages as the flagship products and start paid advertising for them.
On the other hand, I will start optimizing my flagship products or services using SEO methodology. It’s a fact that SEO methodology takes a long time like 3 – 6 months to get you ranked better in SERP. But it may take a year to get your web pages/landing pages to rank well and get a better chunk of overall searches for the targeted keywords. Once you start getting better traffic than what you are paying to get from paid advertising, stop paying the search engine for that keywords.
In the next phase, you start paying full attention to keep the ranks up for the already ranked pages using SEO methodology. As SEO involves content marketing, video marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, push notifications, etc. the effect and reach of your content is more than what you are reaching through paid advertising.
Once you take up already ranked pages, select other pages that you want to rank on search engine and start paid advertising for them. Once the SEO process starts getting ample traffic, stop paid advertising and go for the next batch.
The selection of both the marketing methodologies is due to the fact that these methods are profitable to your business. And selecting SEO and paid advertising wisely for your online business is helpful. For your next year resolution, you should consider both SEO and paid advertising to start getting traffic even at the start of your business.
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