Should I Use Adwords or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get found on Google?

Adwords or SEO…that is the question…

And the answer is … Yes! lol

The truth is that both methods work. One can bring predictable, high quality traffic almost instantly (Adwords) but it costs money each time someone clicks your ad. The other (SEO) works more slowly when your website is new, but can bring you steady, high quality traffic for the long term, without any cost for visitors to be taken to your website. Either way you are spending money. Neither SEO or Adwords management is free. Even if you do it yourself, is your time really free? How much money are you losing because you are trying to do too many different things and sales slip between your fingers because your competitor was more focused today? And are you already good at Adwords or SEO? Do you really have time to become proficient at it right now?

Think about how soon you need the traffic…now or down the road? Probably both, right?

 

Hybrid Digital Marketing

Most internet marketing companies want to do just one or the other (whichever one they know how to do) , but most small businesses need to use “Hybrid Internet Marketing”, especially early on, mixing Google Adwords ads in, along with SEO. You can go out of business over and over again while you wait for visitors to find your new website using SEO only. Or if you are not careful to properly manage your Adwords campaigns, you could go broke buying clicks over the long haul, if you don’t have a transition to SEO based marketing in mind. The secret is to try and build SEO into your site as you go along but go ahead and start running Adwords campaigns. This way, you can laser target the best keywords to optimize your webpages for. The most effective keywords are often not what you think they are going to be. Or, the top keywords may be so expensive (in Adwords) or hard to rank for (using SEO) that you need to go after less competitive keywords. This way, you can develop a strong position in search engine results pages (SERPS) for these secondary keywords that can bring a fair amount of traffic. The secondary keywords (or second tier keywords as some would say) will cost less in Adwords clicks and will be easier for your pages to rank for, using SEO.

Later on, you may not need paid ads like Adwords as badly, if your site is getting good targeted traffic for free, but when you see other keywords that can bring paying customers, it may be time to start using Adwords again, in conjunction with your SEO efforts.