Which is the best digital marketing strategy for online traffic? SEO or Google Ads?
The hottest buzzwords in digital marketing are Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). We are often asked by new clients which of these strategies they should focus their advertising dollars and efforts on. Let’s start with the difference.
Google Ads (Search Engine Marketing) and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) are two unique digital marketing campaign strategies used by businesses to boost their online visibility.
Simply, these are strategies used by businesses to get found online by customers/ clients.
What are Google Ads?
Google Ads, or SEM (Search Engine Marketing), is the world’s largest and most dynamic pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform.
Google Ads provides advertisers with the ability to create relevant text ads that are found at the top of specified search results. These ads direct traffic to your website or ideally a specific landing page.
Additionally, advertisers are able to further segment campaigns, targeting users via a mixture of location, demographics, household income, marital status, and parental status.
With Google Ads, your business is charged each time a user clicks on an ad and traffic is sent directly to your website, or by another name, PPC (Pay-Per-Click). PPC advertising lets advertisers serve ads on an advertising platform by paying the host each time an ad is clicked.
The maths is quite straightforward:
say, your $1000 advertising spend that generates 500 clicks at $2 per click. [$2 x $500 = $1000].
The results are transparent, easy to optimise, and can effectively scale revenue quickly and accurately.
The ads sit on the very top of a Google search result just like in the image below.
What is SEO?
SEO on the other hand focuses on relevant content creation and other tactics to organically rank your website for key search terms relating to your business.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a longer-term strategy. SEO provides access to free, qualified leads (a person or business who may eventually become a customer/client) that are ready and looking to purchase your unique products or services.
A successful SEO strategy ensures your business is easily found on Google when the right customers are researching & comparing businesses like yours.
Organic listings are free of charge, therefore you won’t pay each time a user clicks on these listings. SEO organic listings sit below paid ads.
Why Google Ads?
As mentioned, paid search ads are positioned at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This positioning, along with the customisable nature of search ads (through additional features such as site links, locations, phone numbers, pricing, etc.), gives advertisers far more control over what the user first sees on the search result.
Paid ads can be implemented straight away, providing immediate results for your business. There is indeed no faster way to get in front of customers when they are primed to buy than paid Google Ads.
Advertisers can target users based on several factors such as location, demographics, household income, marital status, and parental status.
With a good strategy, diligent management, and careful data analysis of your campaign’s performance, optimisation allows to reduce costs and increase returns as the campaign rolls out.
Why SEO?
SEO takes time. Rolling out an SEO strategy can take between 3 – 6 months to achieve the desired results with an SEO campaign. However, once successful, proper SEO is generally more cost-effective in the long-term than any other marketing tactic, providing free brand awareness, relevant traffic and customers to your website.
We see higher conversion rates from the clicks on well-placed organic listings than from paid ads.
A higher percentage of users click on the organic results, and, in the eyes of many consumers, organic results are the most trustworthy.
So, What’s Better SEO or Google Ads?
Knowing your specific business goals and objectives is the first step in establishing which digital marketing strategy is most effective.
For the majority of customers, a successful digital marketing strategy will most likely consider both tactics. Both of these provide handsome returns on investment in the long term.
SEO can take six months or potentially longer to see favourable results (industry dependent), therefore it can take longer to realise your return on investment.
Google Ads can start to provide immediate return on your investment, however, unlike SEO, you will always pay for the traffic Google Ads sends to your website.
Thorough research and understanding of your prospective customers, including how they find and use your website is a critical first step in determining whether SEO or Google Ads is right for your business.
See the Label currently helps a wide variety of different businesses across many industries grow online, increase revenue and create worthy content tailored to your users. Speak to us about our SEO & Google Ads management services.
