When to use SEO and when to opt for paid search advertising?
In search engine marketing, you have to pick your battles very carefully. Sometimes concentrating on SEO makes more sense, other times you have to spend your money on paid search advertisings. The table below gives a break down on these two tactics.
| SEO | Paid Search Ads | |
|---|---|---|
| What is it? | Search Engine Optimization optimizes your website for higher organic rankings on search engines (Google, Yahoo or Bing.) | Pay-per-click or banner ads that go through Google Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter or Yahoo Search Marketing platforms. |
| Required Effort | SEO strategy can be resource intensive task, especially for a SME. | Paid search advertising requires nominal effort only. |
| Time to Result | Slow – SEO listings can take a few weeks to materialize. A full SEO campaign can even take a year to be fully realized. | Instantaneously – Search advertising can take a day to be setup and go live. But, once you turn ofF your budget, your ads are gone. |
| Audience Targeting | Broad Targeting – Organic searches are hard to target to a specific audience | Specific targeting – Ads can be targeted to specific demographics, geographics, time-of-day, negative word filtering, etc |
| Costs | Higher startup, but low monthly fees. Expect to pay +$5,000 for startup with 15% monthly maintenance | Lower startup, but high running costs. Pay +$2,000 startup with +100% monthly running costs. |
| Departments involved | Spans large marketing and web team | A few marketing personnel |
| External Help required? | Good idea to hire SEO consultant | Online Ads agency help not required |
| Summary | SEO is a good overall lead-generation tool. It CAN NOT be used for a specific campaign. SEO takes longer to trickle through, but the investment pays off with a brand image. Visitors trust organic searches more than paid listings. | Search ads are good for specific campaigns that have a start and stop date. You CAN NOT build a brand using search advertising. It will just be too expensive and eventually break your bank. |
Tags: adwords, Online Ads, online marketing, SEM, SEO
Trackback from your site.
Comments (8)
Pollmann82
| #
Zaki, thanks for the article. I’ve been thinking about running more Ads, but SEO has been one of those ongoing things. The problem with SEO is that its so hard to measure. You make a change here, and sometimes it can take weeks to see the results. So for the short attention-span marketing team, paid advertising is easier to coordinate.
Reply
Rita Chopra
| #
SEO is very important to do. It has to be done all the time. Moreover, Paid advertising is something that some private organizations can not afford. So SEO is by far a good road to take.
Reply
Safe Auto Ins
| #
Zaki, thanks for the article. I’ve been thinking about running more Ads, but SEO has been one of those ongoing things. The problem with SEO is that its so hard to measure. You make a change here, and sometimes it can take weeks to see the results. So for the short attention-span marketing team, paid advertising is easier to coordinate.
Reply
Brian
| #
It’s a good read, but it comes down to resources. How much can you afford to invest into such efforts? That will dictate if you can make a difference or else its just wasting money.
Reply
Flyer Design
| #
Sometimes you just have to do both because they are useful!
Reply
ModernSEO
| #
SEO is always needed, question is how much can you invest into it.
Reply
Chen W
| #
You have to use SEO all the time. Its more a question of how much effort goes into SEO.
Reply
M Schenderlein
| #
SEO is always a good idea – it can never let you down. Traffic from Google and other search engines perform, react better than paid advertising.
Reply