Reaching your target audience is possible when you have the right marketing strategy. Every day, it’s estimated that 8.5 billion searches are processed on Google. Search engine optimization (SEO) and paid advertising are the two most common strategies. However, which approach should you invest your time and money in?
By examining the benefits and drawbacks of each strategy, you’ll gain insight into the best approach to meet your business goals and priorities.
Who Needs SEO Services?
SEO involves optimizing your website and content to rank high in search engines like Google.
The benefits of SEO include:
Sustained leads and traffic over time – SEO leads usually convert better because people search specifically for your products or services. The traffic is ongoing as long as your rankings are maintained. On-page SEO and other techniques help maintain your rankings.
Cost-effective long-term strategy – While SEO does require an initial investment of time and resources, those costs pay off over months and years. There are no advertising fees.
Builds authority and trust – High SEO rankings increase the credibility of your brand and establish you as an authority in your line of business.
These are just a few of the many benefits of SEO services. Keep in mind that SEO takes a significant amount of time, often 6-12 months, to start seeing results. It also requires continual effort to create fresh content and keep up with algorithm updates.
Benefits of Paid Advertising
Paid advertising like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and display advertising can provide many benefits for your business.
These benefits include:
Immediate results – You can launch a paid ad campaign and see leads coming in within days.
Test different keywords – Identify which keywords drive conversions for your business before investing in something else.
Targeted reach – Paid ads allow you to target your ads to a specific demographic.
Brand awareness – Social display ads can reach your target audience to people who may not be actively searching for your business.
One of the significant downsides of paid ads is that you must keep spending money to keep showing your ads to gain traffic. There is no sustained organic growth like with SEO.
How Do SEO and Paid Ads Work Together?
The best digital marketing strategy is to use both SEO and paid advertising based on your business goals, budget, and target audience. SEO and paid search ads can work together to attract your target audience who search for your products and services. Paid social and display ads help get your brand discovered by new audiences.
You can also change your marketing strategy from paid advertising to SEO as your organic rankings improve.
The combination of both long-term SEO services and flexible paid ads will maximize visibility, traffic, and leads for your business.
Watch our video to learn more.
