A good amount of people out there have trouble understanding all the terms and jargon used by digital marketers nowadays. When it comes to terms that seem so closely related, like search engine optimization and search engine marketing, it can definitely become quite confusing. But in reality, once you have these two terms properly explained to you, the understanding will become very clear.
What’s the Difference Between Paid Search and Search Engine Optimization?
To start, there’s one key difference between SEO and SEM when it comes to strategy.
SEO is an organic search marketing strategy.
SEM is a paid search marketing strategy.
In order to bring your company’s website to its full potential, you need to utilize both of these strategies. Finding a professional marketing company that can handle both your SEO services and your SEM services will help take your business to the next level.
Search Engine Optimization Marketing
Search engine optimization services are used to get a website’s ranking on Google as high as possible. When users search for a type of service, product, or industry, you want your website to show up right away. This strategy will ultimately increase the amount of quality traffic a business will receive online. However, the best SEO requires constant maintenance, because Google is always changing the rules and algorithms they use to rank websites.
Google Search Ads
Utilizes paid advertisements on a pay per click basis in order to direct traffic to a website. The more paid ads a business puts on the web, the more likely their website will be found by users searching for their services. The important thing about google pay per click marketing is that keyword phrases that will match what the user is searching for. This strategy requires relevant keyword research and constant evaluating to make sure the ad campaign stays on track and ultimately targets the users that are more likely to convert.
As you can probably conclude so far, both of these strategies require constant upkeep and maintenance in order to run properly. That’s why having a digital marketing firm handle these online marketing strategies for you is key to saving time and energy you would need to put into keeping up with both your website and your ad campaigns.
Diving back into Search Engine Optimization
There are two different types of quality SEO strategies used by SEO professionals, and they are both equally important.
On-Page SEO entails optimized metadata and page copy, properly formatted page URLs, fast page loading speed, internal link building, and some sort of way to share all of the content. Basically, anything that has to do with optimizing the website directly.
Off-Page SEO handles all the link building, social signals, and social bookmarking. These strategies help bring in more traffic from outside sources online.
Without using a combination of both on and off page SEO tactics, your chances of ranking competitively on the search engine results page (SERP) are nearly impossible.
More on Search Engine Marketing
Google search ads use a different approach to gaining quality leads, utilizing paid advertisements to gain more traffic. Running a high-performance Google paid search campaign requires audience research, relevant ad copy, constant ad retargeting, and sometimes even social media optimization.
Which Online Marketing Strategy Should I Use?
A common question we always get is “which service is more important?”
Our answer is that both of these digital marketing services are very important for gaining more quality traffic online. Both SEO and SEM work together in order to achieve one main goal. However, if you need to focus on one strategy over the other, our recommendation is to handle the search engine optimization first, and then when you’re ready, start up a pay per click marketing campaign.
SEO is important for establishing a foundation for your website. Having highly optimized SEO will allow the SEM campaign to perform at its full potential. Once your website’s SEO has a solid foundation, we recommend implementing Google search ads as soon as possible to gain the most amount of quality traffic possible.
If you need help with any of these different quality online marketing services please give our marketing firm a call at 407-923-0109, schedule a 25-minute consultation, or email us at info@socialuprisinginc.com.
2 thoughts on “Google Search Ads Vs. Search Engine Optimization: Which Is Better for Your Business?”
Both ads and SEO have their advantage, so it ultimately depends on your business.
Yes we would agree 100% there are different circumstances in which paid search ads or SEO would be a good fit for a company. Helpful tip, choosing what marketing service to use comes down to a clients timeframe.
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