Organic SEO vs Adwords: Which is Better?
Strategizing For Search Engine Marketing
For every business running a website, there are clear goals when it comes to marketing objectives: traffic, lead generation, and ultimately sales. There are different channels through which marketers can market their website, but the stats show that close to 90% of online users take the search engine route to find desired services and products. Google holds the major share of this market, and is the most preferred search engine. Therefore, it becomes imperative that online marketers consider search engine marketing very, very seriously.
Winning the search engines can be done in two ways: Effectively paying for ads to drive traffic directly to your site from the engines, and converting customers at a rate that makes your business profitable, or investing in organic SEO, which boosts your business up in the actual search engine rankings. Since Google holds a majority share of internet searches, we will focus on deciphering and evaluating the differences between Google Adwords (paid advertising) and organic SEO (which often is still an expense, as work has to be done to rank well in search engines).
The war between SEO vs. Google Adwords as a potential marketing strategy is an ongoing one. With no clear winner taking the trophy home, over a period of time, marketers have decided to merge the two depending upon the immediate needs of the business—customizing the search engine marketing strategy is the best bet when both the choices offer equal advantages.
SEO is indispensable though!
Agreeably, both the strategies have their pros and cons, and depending on budget and targets, either of them can be chosen to start with; however, SEO is simply indispensable because it has long-lasting benefits. It builds credibility of a website, and is more natural as a process. Like the historical steam engines, it does take extra time to start and deliver, yet it is cost-effective and does not stop instantly.
Adwords vs. SEO
Pitting the two against each other, let’s get a closer look as to what each strategy has to offer:
- Google Adwords, as clear from the name itself, is a product by Google. It caters to Google and websites that are using Google Adsense program as publishers. Though Google inks deals with other partners time and again, running Google Adwords campaigns will not ensure that you get traffic from other search engines. Whereas organic SEO will benefit you in all the search engines.
- Google Adwords campaign give you top and right-side position of search engine result pages, while with SEO, you will have to really work hard to get the top position. Top position through Adwords is flimsy because as soon as your budget runs out of money, you lose it. However, if you achieve top position through SEO, you will stay there for a while even if you stop optimizing.
- Google Adwords is instant while SEO takes time. For new websites and businesses, this can be a deciding factor.
- Google Adwords allows you to target specific keywords in large numbers, but for SEO, you have to be very specific and focused on the number of keywords that you target.
- Google Adwords will not require any change in your website, but SEO does require a lot of tweaking in web design to make your site properly optimized.
- If you are a local business or serve a particular geographic area, Google Adwords give you better control of targeting users from that area. SEO requires more efforts to go deeper for local search results.
Organic SEO provides a staircase to the top, whereas search engine advertising is more like an elevator…that (usually) costs more money!
SEO’s Trust Factor
One major area where SEO totally outranks Adwords is the trust factor of the website. If you are able to achieve good ranking through SEO efforts, it establishes your business as an authority. Users start believing in your credibility and authenticity more than they will ever believe in when you buy a rank through Adwords.
In Google’s search engine result pages, Adwords listing is clearly marked as ‘Ad,’ which shows it’s paid ranking. A lot of users simply navigate away from those results because they are looking for more natural results.
Conclusion: SEO vs. Adwords
When evaluating your search engine marketing strategy, you need to make sustainable, optimized choices. First you must determine your budget and your objectives. If you need quick results and have a good budget, Google Adwords would be the first choice to be supplemented by a good SEO strategy. However, if you have lesser budget and can wait for a while as you build your online audience, SEO is your best bet.