To SEO or Not to SEO

When you type a search into Google you are shown a list of websites that match your search.

This list of websites is actually two lists. One is referred to as the “Free or Organic list” and the other is known as the “Paid listings”.

The Free listings come from Google’s main search lists and the Paid listings come from Google Adwords.

To appear in the Free listing has cost the website no money. Hence their name. Web pages are listed here based on how Google ranks those web pages for the keywords you type. The technique used for making sure your web pages rank high for your chosen keywords is called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short.

Your first impression might be why would anyone pay Google Adwords for a listing if you can get listed for free using SEO.

The reality is that SEO is not really free. For starters most business will hire an SEO consultant to manage their website optimisation for them. So there is a direct cost.

Even those businesses that decide to do it themselves have a cost because you need to spend a lot of time and effort on SEO to get yourself listed for your keywords. Time is money after all!

So which do you choose? SEO or Adwords?

Ideally your marketing strategy should include a mix of marketing activities so choosing both would be ideal.

However choosing both may not be an immediate option so here is a brief comparison to help you decide whether to start with the SEO route for the Adwords route.

SEO and Adwords – A Brief Comparison

Price

As we have already stated SEO is technically considered as free traffic but there is a price to pay both in time and investing in an SEO expert.

For Adwords there is the ongoing cost of paying for clicks as well as any costs for management of the Adwords account.

Speed

Adwords is a clear winner here. Your listing can be created and appearing in minutes. It can take weeks or months to get to the top of the listings with SEO. It’s even harder if your website is relatively new as the age of your website is one of the influencing factors in SEO.

Stability

Every so often you will here about the “Google slap”.

This is when Google changes the rules for SEO and pages that were once at the top of the lists will plummet out of existence.

Google keeps the rules it uses very secret and so SEO experts often have to second guess the changes in order to prevent websites getting “slapped”.

Adwords doesn’t suffer from this problem and so Adwords offers less risk in terms of maintaining your web traffic.