Google Ads or SEO – which is better to invest in?
For many companies, search engine traffic is the one that brings a lot of conversions and revenue. But how to increase it, if at our disposal are both Google Ads and positioning. What are the differences between the two options and when is it worth choosing one of them?
Deciding on both options, ultimately our website will be visited by new users, who will probably at least partially decide on our products and services. But how different will be the path to gaining these customers if you choose either SEO or PPC advertising??
The time in which the effects will appear
This is one of the main differences to look at between SEO and Google Ads. Google Ads will take effect immediately, appearing in search results and generating traffic to our site. To get started, all you need to do is determine the right key phrases and the budget you want to allocate to advertising, including the rates you are willing to accept. If our offer is better than the competition’s, ads will quickly appear on Google.
It will be different in the case of SEO – here we will have to wait for the effect, sometimes significantly, if we are interested in the most competitive phrases. SEO audit, changes in the website and optimization work will not be omitted, in addition, acquiring valuable links will be necessary, and it is a process that lasts all the time. If you have many big players in your market, it can take months or years to surpass them in search results.
The duration of the effects
In the case of Google Ads, promotion and traffic generation will last as long as we have a budget for promotion. If it ends, or we abandon the promotion, the traffic in Google will probably return to similar as before the campaign was launched. In the case of Google Ads you have to reckon with fixed costs.
It is different in SEO. Here, incremental actions bring more and more traffic to our website. The various actions, however, do not end when we finish paying the invoices. If you want to take a break for a while, SEO effects will generate traffic all the time, so sales should not drop drastically. However, if we abandon SEO for good, it’s important to remember that our competitors may be ahead of us if they are also investing in SEO.
The number of key phrases we promote ourselves on
In the case of Google Ads, the number is not limited. If only we have an appropriate budget, we can advertise for any number of key phrases. It’s a little different for SEO – here the number may be limited due to the number of pages within a site. If we want to be displayed for more key phrases, it will be important to create new subpages, saturate existing ones with content or start a blog. Otherwise, the number of key phrases a domain responds to in a search engine will grow slowly.
Changing the key phrases on which we advertise
Again, it is easy to see the advantage of Google Ads and PPC ads – if we just want to change the keyword phrases we are positioning for, we can do it in a few moments. It is different in the case of SEO, here such changes will take place slowly, changes will have to be made to the website, changes to the content, and often also acquiring new links leading to the domain – so the whole process will take much longer than in the case of Google Ads.
SEO or Google Ads – which is better to decide on?
There is no single, easy answer here. Google Ads will certainly be a better solution if we want to start acting quickly, but it may turn out that in the end it is SEO that will be a cheaper solution – everything depends on the industry in which we operate and the market on which we operate.
Google Ads is also a more flexible method, but a good choice of key phrases for SEO means that we will not have to bear the consequences of changing them.
At the same time, you can always decide on both solutions, at least at the beginning, so that on the one hand the effects appear quickly (thanks to Google Ads), while they will also be relatively constant, thanks to investing in positioning. However, everything depends on the specific industry – in some of them we will get a better ROI if we invest in SEO, in other cases, it will be Google Ads and PPC advertising. It is worth asking a specialist from an agency whose offer we are interested in what they recommend in a particular case.
