SEO or Paid Advertising
SEO and Paid Advertising are both in the top 5 methods used by local businesses when marketing online. We are often asked which of these 2 methods would suit best in their business and have recorded a conversation where we discuss which one would work best in your business.
We also discuss the idea of an overall marketing plan and how that would look for your business.
Time Stamps
What is SEO? – Time: 00:32
What Are Paid Ads? – Time: 1:10
The 2 Key Differences Between SEO and Paid Ads – Time: 2:16
The Greatest Individual Benefits Of SEO and Paid Advertising – Time: 3:35
How To Dominate Your Marketplace – Time: 4:54
It’s a Question Of How Many – Time: 6:54
In The Next Video – Time: 7:35
Transcript
Hey David Judge here and today we’re going to talk SEO and Paid Advertising and which one’s best for your business.
And this is a really interesting question which is about more than just one or the other, but more around the direction of your business and what your overall online plans are.
Before we jump into that, lets invest a few seconds in looking at what SEO and Paid Ads actually are before we jump into the best one for your business.
What is SEO?
Ok, so in a nutshell, SEO also known as Search Engine Optimisation (and organic traffic) is a process used to increase your visibility on the search engines. This is most commonly measured using Google as it holds a massive percentage of the marketplace with over 100 billion searches performed every month. When you search for something on Google the results that show up on the left hand side are the ORGANIC results.
The big attraction to SEO is the cost and to this day is one of the most cost effective methods to getting business.
What Are Paid Ads?
Paid Ads are exactly as they sound where you are paying to get visitors to your door. While Google have a massive hold on this market as well (you can see these generally on the top or right hand side – labelled as Ads), other providers include Facebook (which has really grown in 2014), LinkedIn ads and Twitter ads.
These are usually what are called ‘Pay Per Click’ (meaning you pay every time people click on your ad), dependant on the website you can also have ‘Cost Per Impression’ (which is paying an agreed amount for a number of times an ad shows up or ‘Cost Per Action’ (which is only paying when a person takes and action like buying your product).
SEO and Paid Advertising are both in the top 5 most commonly used methods for businesses looking at getting found online and both are very unique in the way they attract new leads.
The 2 Key Differences Between SEO and Paid Ads
Ok, the key differences between the 2 are simply TIME and MONEY.
To explain, to get a really well performing SEO campaign you need to invest the TIME. Just a few areas around SEO include:
– The layout and structure of your website
– The quality of the content within your site and the message it delivers
– How other sites connect with you and the value of that connection
– The authority of your site and brand
– How others interact and engage with your site
A well executed SEO campaign can take up to 6 months to Yield a return and if set up correctly will bring in a lot of solid business.
When it comes to paid advertising the level of entry (if you were to call it that) is actually lower. This means whilst there are other certain requirements it’s a lot easier (and faster) to get your business found online.
The cost (excuse the pun) of Paid advertising is literally in the amount of MONEY you can afford to spend on your ads, which is of course relative to how much money you make through the leads you convert.
So thats the 2 biggest differences (yes Time and Money).
The Greatest Individual Benefits Of SEO and Paid Advertising [h2] Time: 3:35
Lets now delve briefly into the Greatest Benefit of each and we’ll start with SEO first.
In my opinion EVERY BUSINESS that has a presence online should be performing SEO techniques as a bare minimum as these foundational techniques help to grow your reputation. They also assist with the visitors to your site to best understand how and why they would want to deal with your and your unique Value Proposition.
The greatest benefit of SEO is you earn your level of Search Engine Visibility and unlike Paid Advertising where you literally disappear once you stop paying and are replaced by your competitors. In other words in SEO, once you’re up there, you stay there.
The greatest benefit of Paid Advertising is you can target your potential leads and dependant on the paid medium you can even target specific groups of people, their location along with their likes and dislikes. With paid advertising you can also target people that have already visited your site with ads on other peoples sites pointing them back to your site again. Pretty Tricky yeah?
How To Dominate Your Marketplace [h2] Time: 4:54
So lets look at the original question of SEO or Paid Advertising and I’ll do this with a client example.
We have a client that we manage a paid advertising campaign for and when he first started he was literally just dipping his toe in the water with a paid budget of just $500 a month. He was getting very little results from this and when we assessed the campaign after the first month we confirmed he was not investing enough in his campaign.
After a long conversation we convinced him to quadruple his spend up to $2000 for just that one month. As a result of that one month’s increase he experienced over 150% increase in business for that month. This was like a revelation for him as he understood by increasing how much he was INVESTING in his marketing his return on investment also increased.
It was at this time he added SEO to his campaign, with the understanding that it would take several months to see a result, yet the money he was making from his Paid Advertising covered the investment of his SEO whilst it kicked into gear to start bringing leads.
6 months down the track the client had increased his monthly budget to $15,000 a month and his SEO was in full gear, bringing in a 3/4 of the business of his paid advertising yet his revenue had increased by a much larger rate (he wouldn’t share the exact amount, but he was very happy). Even though this created growing pains in his business he acknowledged it was a good position to be in.
For this client he realised Paid advertising and SEO played their part in his business and he needed both if he wanted to truly dominate in his area of business.
In other words he used multiple strategies to grow his income as opposed to one single strategy.
It’s a Question Of How Many
So, that’s my answer folks… It’s not really a question of one or the other, it’s more of a question of how many.
If you do not have the time or money for both then I would use Paid advertising to get the ball rolling and then use SEO and other strategies to lay down the foundation for the longer term. If you do use this approach make sure you invest enough in your spend to gain consistent visibility and in turn generate those leads.
Ok, lets wrap up…
In The Next Video
In the next video we’re going to talk about Landing Pages, the purpose of a Landing Page and the key elements every landing page should have.
If you run ANY paid advertising then you need to check this out.
If you have a question you would like me to answer make sure you get in contact and I love to hear from you.
As always this is David Judge talking online marketing and showing you how to grow your business online.
