What Is Good For Your Business? Paid Media Or SEO

Shruti Tomar           27 March 2023

Businesses of all magnitudes are realizing the significance of online marketing, particularly through search engines. However, this realization brings forth the big question and decision to be made - whether to capitalize on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Paid Advertising (Google AdWords), or a healthy combination of both. Simply put, SEO-based advertising, or Search Engine Optimization, is the custom of including content on your website that has the potential to improve your site’s visibility to search engines and to their users – in other words, it can support your site to show up more often in applicable searches. However, paid advertising is a system of advertising where a business can bid to have their ads appear in the sponsored section on search engine results pages. Essentially, you bid to have your businesses’ ad appear within the sponsored content when someone types in a query including your previously-specified keywords.

• How do they work

Good SEO tactics work to better your website's organic traffic. There are several things to look for when trying to improve your site’s organic traffic. First, and most important, make sure the writing on your website is clear, supportive, and expressive. State your purpose in simple, easily readable language, and try to take in words you think a user might search for when looking online for what you are offering. There's no cost to appear in organic search results like Google's, and making small changes to your website to improve overall SEO can significantly impact your search rankings over time. Paid advertising, on the other hand, lets advertisers bid for ad placement in a search engine's sponsored links when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their business offering. If you bid on a keyword, depending on your website’s quality score (which is an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages) your ad could show up on top of the Google results page for that keyword. Every time your ad is clicked and sends a visitor to your website, you pay the search engine a small fee. A lot goes into building a persuasive paid advertising campaign, from researching and selecting the precise keywords, to organizing those keywords in a well-organized campaign and ad groups, to setting up landing pages that are optimized for conversions. Search engines reward advertisers that can fashion relevant, intelligently targeted pay-per-click campaigns by charging them less for ad clicks.

• Which is right for your business?

Eventually, the decision lies with you to decide which selection works best for your business, but it’s worth considering that focusing on both SEO and paid advertising can both help in different ways. Search Engine Optimization is a traditional foundation of successful digital marketing because it gives your business the best chance of being discovered, even if the optimization process takes a while to get right. Paid advertising lets you reach customers more instantly, no matter how large or small your business is, and lets you modify your message. If you are a small local business with little competition, skipping out on paid advertising and relying on SEO may be the best choice for you as it is the most cost-effective. However, if you are an e-commerce business and your competition is the larger companies such as Amazon or eBay, organic search results may be tougher to contest with, no matter how much you commit to an SEO strategy. Ideally, it would be great if a business can use a win-win combination of paid advertising and SEO in their digital marketing tactics. They work better together by strengthening and backing each other. Using SEO and paid advertising together may render you the best chance of channelising the traffic to your site in the short term, and enhancing your business’s online presence for long-term gains. At Duti Corp, we offer customized digital marketing programmes to help you grow your business.