SEO or Google Adwords? Which is Most Important?
The short answer is both.
You should pursue both Google Adwords and SEO at the same time – because they both work together for the same end.
20% of SEO On Page Optimisation
SEO is a long term strategy.
About 20% of the whole thing (in my opinion and experience) is about on-page optimisation. This means about 20% of the whole job is making sure you are optimising for the right words.
Traditional SEO people look at keyword research tools such as the Google Keyword Tool as well as other word tracking tools and real-time search results and change the structure of the site, the information in the title and description, the internal linking structure and the website copy itself in order to make changes to your ranking in the search engines.
It’s an art and not a science. Opinions often differ about the best way to do it.
80% of SEO is reputation
In short, who links to you and how important and relevant they are to your business.
As such, I often advise clients (especially smaller business owners) NOT to spend excessive amounts of time link building. A lot of sites don’t want to share link juice, especially if you are a “for profit” organisation. So linking in this way is slow and hard to engineer.
Digital PR on the other hand, may be a different kettle of fish if you can come up with the right story and release it in such a way as to generate many new inlinks to your site.
SEO has it’s place, but it’s a long trek, not a short sprint. Success is never guaranteed and you should steer clear of anyone who promises guaranteed results.
So where does Google Adwords Fit In?
Google Adwords is a short, medium AND long term strategy.
Here’s why…
- Adwords offers instant, fast, turn-on-and-off-as-you-need, traffic.
This means that it’s great for short term marketing campaigns and offers where SEO is too slow to respond to your campaign needs.
The capabilities of Adwords means that you can turn your business strategy on a dime without breaking a sweat. To give you a real life example, I just helped a business do exactly that this morning. To all intents and purposes right now, our advertising is going out to a completely different market segment to test how it responds.
- Adwords shows you the best words to use for SEO
You can pick a ton of words you want to optimise for, but how do you know if they convert visitors in to customers?
You see, your business should be concerned not just about traffic, but the right kind of traffic which brings you the right customers and the right revenues.
- Where you already rank well on Page 1, Adwords offers dominance
You can get up to 14 times more traffic from being in the number 1 spot compared to the number 10 spot on page 1 of Google. If the page you want to rank on is really important, it’s worth advertising twice on that page. Adwords means you can choose your preferred position on the page so you get twice the chance of being seen
- Where you don’t or can’t rank well, Google Adwords gives you visibility
It’s impossible to optimise for everything.
It would take too long and cost too much.
Google Adwords however, allows you to invest in an incredibly broad (and yet targeted reach) which SEO by nature of its limitations, cannot achieve.
Conclusion
So the answer is both.
Every marketing plan needs both short and long term strategies and no single advertising medium (whether climbing the search engine rankings slowly or using Google Adwords campaigns) offers a universal panacea.
The best marketing plans always use a mix of strategies to creat business.
If you need help with your Google Adwords campaign or a robust marketing strategy, call me on 01392 477 465 to discuss your needs and find out how I can help you.
