The choice to invest in either Google Ads or SEO for your business can be a pretty daunting task, more than you might imagine. It calls for a deeper understanding as to what these two options are and what they offer to your business. If you are looking to improve your website’s performance, you need deeper insights into your Adwords and SEO options before you settle.
SEO and Adwords constitute the prime aspects of Search Engine Marketing. They are significant tools for any business that runs or looks forward to running digital marketing campaigns. Different marketing environments require different SEM tools. In some situations, they can be coupled up or used separately depending on what your marketing and business goals are.
It is important to note that this is not a question of a simple ‘YES’ or ‘NO’ answer. There are a myriad of factors that essentially influence the tool that works for any business. Before delving into some of these factors, it is first important to understand what these tools are.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
This is a process of getting your business’ website to rank in some of the major search engines including Google, Yahoo, and Bing for the selected keywords through different kinds of on-site and off-site optimizations. SEO is a critical aspect of business marketing that is among the top tolls with the highest conversion numbers in reeling in new customers.
You need to read and understand SEO terminology and some of the tips on the vital configurations you need so that your website becomes search engine friendly. Including backlinks to your website’s contents is just one of the ways you can do some SEO marketing or Google advertising for your business to drive more leads.
Using Google SEO as a marketing tool is a moving target but as much so an exact science. This is because Google makes constant updates on their search algorithm and such updates impact the company ranks sites. Recently, Google chose to backtrack its previous extension to its site Meta description length.
Google Ads
Several words can be thrown around like CPC, campaigns, PPC, or Adwords concerning digital marketing, without necessarily knowing what they mean precisely. Google Ads, otherwise referred to as Google Ads, is a Google-owned advertising platform.
Businesses that own websites can use the platform to make advertisements by positioning them in Google Products like Gmail and YouTube and Google Search Result Pages including other websites. As a business owner, you can decide to utilize Cost Per Click (CPC) where you pay someone when he clicks on your ad or the CPM when our audience sees your ad. Google Ads functions best through the Google Display Network, which allows advertisers to reach a larger number of people as they browse through their favorite websites or enjoying videos on YouTube or even checking the Gmail account.
Essentially. Google Display Network helps advertisers find the right audience for advertisers since its targeting options give advertisers the chance to strategically show their ads to potential customers that may be interested in their products. This works best by helping advertisers find new customers or actively engage their existing audiences and driving more conversions utilizing automation. If you are finding it a bit challenging to choose the right keywords for your ad, let a Google Ads keyword tool do it for you and let it help get yours before the right audience.
Factors influencing the choice between SEO and Google Ads
Now that you have a rough idea of what SEO and Google Ads are all about, it is necessary to take a look at some of the factors that influence the type of tool that you will pick for your business. Here are 5 factors that will guide your choice of a marketing tool for your business.
1. Better conversions
Looking at this from a general perspective, both Google Ads and SEO offer great conversion rates to advertisers. However, the difference now comes in when it comes to targeting flexibility because the greater the targeting flexibility, the better Google Ads is suited than SEO. Nonetheless, if you discover that your Adwords is sucking your budget dry in terms of investment, it calls for a quick assessment of your return of investment ratio while accordingly making marketing strategies comparison.
On the other hand, if you realize that SEO can improve your chances of earning greater rankings in the voluminous footfall traffic and search results, make that wise decision to go for SEO because it seemingly surpasses your Google Ads strategy to enable you to achieve a better ration in terms of return on investment.
2. Cost factor
The fundamental aspect of Adwords is paid advertising or paid marketing. It works on an advertiser’s ad quality and the relevance of the backlinks and the bidding strategy. This only means that as an advertiser, you need to make payments to promote your ad on the search engine. On the other hand, SEO is a more organic marketing strategy that is free and you can do it yourself. Even though you can do it yourself, you must involve professional help through the services of an SEO service provider to ensure that you get faster and better results.
3. Traffic and position
You can achieve almost immediate results while using Google Ads but the use of SEO requires the virtue of patience. A Pay Per Click (PPM) campaign is instrumental in helping advertisers list their websites at the very top of results from a search engine in the category of sponsored. This, then, offers advertisers a better opportunity of gaining more traffic immediately and in a shorter time with minimum effort. Therefore, you have to pay for a position that you wish your message to appear on the search results.
SEO is a slow type of advertising tool that builds up momentum with time. This means that the rankings you would get from SEO are purely based on your choice of keywords, content quality, link building, and site optimization among other factors. It is important to understand that the skills of your SEO partner will go a long way in giving you better results. Strive to look for an effective SEO agency to help you avert the need for paying the search engine for SEO.
4. Targeting
SEO gives you a chance to promote your business depending on your target audience but focuses on the use of keywords to reach your targeted audience. Contrarily, Adwords is efficiently optimized to ensure that advertisers achieve maximum returns on investment. This gives an advertiser maximum targeting options to enable the advertiser to reach the target audience searching for services offered similar to theirs. This means that the better option for reaching a particular audience is Google Ads.
5. Long term strategy
If you are looking to achieve long-term goals in terms of digital marketing, SEO will ultimately get you there. This is because the structure of Google Ads is designed to offer advertisers immediate results and benefits based on how they chose to invest in promotional ads. As soon as an advertiser stops making payments for the ads, the returns too. This is why SEO is the logical tool to go for when looking to achieve long-term goals because each of an advertiser’s efforts will continue giving you returns long after you halt on investing in your Google SEO strategy.
Brief comparison
This is a general glimpse of how SEO and Google Ads compare.
- It is easier to calculate your ROI with Adwords since your advertising campaigns are instant while you need more time to make your calculations, especially if you have a relatively new website.
- SEO is free while Adwords traffic is paid.
- The outcomes you get from SEO are intended solely for search result pages whereas Adwords gives you the chance to advertise on websites other than Google including those that use Google Adsense.
- You can achieve immediate results since you can instantly create your ad campaigns and get targeted traffic but you need more time to get good traffic and rankings when using SEO.
- With SEO, you will continue enjoying organic traffic after you invest but the traffic you get stops when you also stop paying for your Adwords campaigns.
- SEO only requires you to focus on limited keywords to achieve the best results whereas you can aim to use as many keywords as you can when using Adwords.
Conclusion
SEO and Google Ads should not be thought of as competitors but rather as very powerful tools that marketers can use in digital marketing. You can choose to use either of them for your business depending on your marketing needs. Therefore, use Adwords when you have a new website or when you need traffic fast to your website but also remember to use SEO to help you achieve sustainable online success in the long run.