Search Engine Optimization and ads are both a great way to get new traffic to a website or store. Getting to know how each will affect your traffic will help you decide where your budget will best be spent.
Ads are generally a Pay-Per-Click(PPC) or a Pay-Per-View(PPM) payment plan. You are essentially bidding against other companies to have your ad shown, and paying based on the results.
SEO is optimizing your website so that Google and other search engines will rank your website higher without paying for the result every time someone sees it. This means your initial investment of content creation pays off over and over as you get return clients.
Running ads can be a great way to get quick attention to a sale or just gaining brand recognition. Sometimes something as simple as retargeting people that watched your video ad with a sale can increase your conversions like crazy. These people are no longer considered cold traffic and are much more intent on making a purchase.
Ranking higher in search results can never be a bad idea for your business. This is a great way to bring in high conversion traffic for months, or even years after you create a piece of content.
Creating website traffic can be great if you’re just using ads or affiliate programs to monetize a blog, but traffic that has intention to convert into sales is worth much, much more over time.
Organizing your headlines and information in a helpful and easy to read manner will almost always improve general rankings. Focus on creating good, helpful, evergreen content, and you won’t have to worry about “beating the algorithm.” This is because Google constantly updates their algorithm to find the best content for the user.
SEO can be as simple as making sure you are the one that created that content.
Short answer? Always.
In a highly competitive niche, it can take months to get ranked on the first 10 pages on google. Meanwhile you could have ranked #1 the first day by paying for ads.
Ads can be a great way to drive a lot of traffic to an offer quickly, while SEO is more of a long term approach to slow and consistent growth. Adding a new article every day, week, or month is a great way to get your company name out there and let people know how you can help.
A plumber posting how-to articles and videos will get more calls just because potential clients can see you’re there to help.