What is better? SEO or Adwords.
Published June 10, 2008 by Mike Seddon
I bet many people have their favourites and anyone new getting into website promotion might wonder whether they should concentrate on SEO for their site or go for Google Adwords.
In an ideal world you would do both with equal effort but who lives in such a world?
So, which one is best?
In my opinion I think it depends on your current needs and circumstances.
Generally if you are looking for to generate traffic quickly and can afford an advertising budget then I would always suggest Adwords as your choice. This is especially true if you have a new website because your SEO efforts are unlikely to have much effect until your website has been in existence for a number of months.
However if you are on a longer term traffic building exercise I would look to SEO as a traffic generator since the traffic it provides is free.
In terms of a straight comparison of which is right for you, here are a few pointers:
Price
SEO is technically free if you do it yourself. I say “technically” because it will still require a lot of your time and as the saying goes, Time is Money! Also, you will probably want to subscribe to some of the better directories for your chosen business.
Adwords obviously isn’t free and for the unwary it can come with a high price tag.
Speed
Adwords wins hands down here. An Ad from Adwords can be created and start appearing in minutes. SEO on the other hand may take weeks or even months to start to impact the search engines sufficiently for you to see traffic arriving at your site.
Competition
In my view Adwords is less competitive than SEO. It’s usually far easier to get your keywords to the top position in Adwords than it is using SEO techniques. Like all things there are going to be exceptions but personally I can get my keywords ranking in the top spots far quicker with Adwords than I can with SEO (maybe it’s because I am better at Adwords than SEO?).
Ongoing Maintenance
Again, this is my personal opinion but I think Adwords requires more continued effort to maintain the top spot for your keywords than SEO does. I generally check and amend my Adwords campaigns every other day (sometimes every day, maybe twice a day!).
In terms of SEO, it’s usually a case of a lot of work upfront to get the onsite SEO right and then in attracting links. However once I get a page to the top of the organic listings it doesn’t require the same level of constant attention that Adwords does to maintain its top position.
In conclusion
In summary, I’d suggest going to Adwords if you are in a hurry and have a budget. If you are in it for the longer game, SEO would seem to be your choice.
Of course, there is no reason why you can’t use both if you have the budget and the time to make it work.
Well, that’s my view; I’d be interested to hear any thoughts.
Mike,
I agree with virtually everything you have said and although SEO generally takes longer I have expereince of instances where, by careful focus on keywords and meta tags, I’ve managed to get on page one of Google within days of crea\ting a new page (against 1m+ other pages). It really comes down to being very specific regards keywords.
Likewise with Adwords I’ve run campaigns where very specific keywords are only searched on infrequently but give 100% Click Through (CTR).
One thing I would add though is that Adwords can be used as a research tool and very quickly yields results (these would take months and a fortune by any other method).
My final point is that although you state that Adwords can be expensive ….. they needn’t be. If they are expensive the keywords used are probably too generic and/or ads poorly written and/or landing pages lack relevance. PPC is really low cost when used correctly. Like you I tend to check them every day but they can be left on autopilot (check weekly) if well set up and giving good CTR and low cost.
Stefan,
Thank you for your comments.
Yes, I agree that Adwords can be an exceptional research tool. It will deliver results very quickly and far cheaper than most other forms of market research.
Mike