"So I'm looking at my budget, some people are telling me to do SEO, some people are saying do paid advertising like Google Ads".. this is a common dilemma.
There are a few levels to this - and it all hinges around a few key questions:
- What do you want to achieve?
- What is your budget?
- Is this for a business venture or personal hobby?
Key differences:
- If you're looking for fast results, Google Ads can deliver, at a cost per click. Think "renting the billboard". Results within hours, but as soon as you stop paying it's off. Google Ads is also not the only paid ad platform out there (bing, Facebook etc), but just the most well known and used.
- If you're looking for long term investment but with free cost per click, SEO (which means "search engine optimisation") is the thing for you. Think "buying the billboard", it takes higher upfront cost and time to pay off but once it's paid off it keeps ticking along delivering almost free results. Note - it's not free, it does take initial and continued investment of some sort to keep it highly ranked, because other competitors are always vying for the spot.
The most effective method for most businesses is a hybrid - a method best described as "Bullets then cannonballs" (a term borrowed from Jim Collins). I'll explain in a minute why the opposite is usually not good.
The reason this is effective is that most digital marketing campaigns are heavily reliant on a few very profitable keywords, and it's often hard to know what those keywords are when you start.
- Google Ads is like tracer bullets, you can pay a couple of dollars a click, put up ads on your products and see which ones really take off, which ones get clicks, and which ones get conversions (sales). If you're like most businesses, you're after the sales, so you want to watch these keywords results, and find the highest performing ones. This process may take either days or months depending on your search volume (you need enough "statistical significance" to know it's a trend and not just a blip).
- NOW you're ready for the big guns - the SEO. You've identified the top keywords you want to nail. Now you either DIY or outsource, but you put time and effort into building content and backlinks all around those high performance keywords. This will take months and thousands of dollars usually, but once you're ranked, every click is free, it's just the SEO maintenance cost ongoing.
So, why start with Ads? Because here's the opposite scenario:
- You start off with some assumptions of which keywords are going to work,
- Spend months and thousands of dollars to get them starting to rank, and then find that they're unprofitable (i.e. even though they get traffic they don't get the required sales).
- This means you're back at square one, and not only that, you've got a site now ranked for the wrong things, which you'll have to work harder to change because Google has already begun to categorise your website in it's algorithms into a different set of keywords than you now want.
Here's broadly what this might look like for a business with a 3,000/month marketing budget and a digital consultant. Note - consultant fees can vary greatly and you often get what you pay for - if you're a big company and requiring professional assistance, don't be surprised at paying a lot more than this. Also sometimes if you spend a lot more upfront, you'll get faster feedback and therefore faster ROI.
- Month 1: you pay 1,500 consultant fees to get the Ads campaigns setup. You spend $1,500 on ad spend (clicks) to test it out
- Month 2: You've figured out which ad spend is working, and the right keywords. You spend $500 on ads (to keep the customer flow going), $1500 on the consultant to manage the ads and SEO campaign, and the remaining $1,000 into backlinks and content creation around the top keywords you've identified, along with potentially building up your Google My Business ranking, additional directory listings, and social media presence. You also ensure you've got analytics setup that are clearly showing you which channels (SEO/ADS) are bringing results.
- Month 3: You do the same thing, and you wonder why it's not working because it feels so long!
- Month 4: Google Ads is still the only thing you can see is working at the moment (which is also why it's important to keep going with it because it's bringing you sales in the short term).
- Month 5: you start to see the rankings climb and start getting sales off organic listings.
Now, here's the point of decision: you've got SEO starting to work, do you turn off ads? The answer as usual, "it depends". If you're fully satisfied with the amount of organic traffic and sales, then possibly yes, you can carry on with free traffic. However there are a few points to consider:
- Google is profit-focused, and continues to rank ads above organic results. This means there will always be traffic you'll miss that click on the top results.
- Is the ad cost exorbitant or are you making a lot more money out of the product than what the ad spend is? Sounds silly but if you had a machine that you could put a dollar into and get two dollars out, how many times would you do it? As many as possible! So if it's working and growing your business, there may be no reason to ever stop, just carry on with both.
- You may even want to consider carrying on ads just to test out new keywords - i.e. keep firing tracer bullets and finding the targets, and then feeding them into your SEO campaign later.
Ok, that that's the "what", and the "so what"!
Now, how about the "now what?"
- If you're a hardcore DIY-er then you will want to check out the articles on this site as to how to learn to run Google Ads and how to perform SEO yourself.
- If you're keen to do it yourself but need an initial guide, then contact Finmark for a strategy session to give you a personalised roadmap you can use to go and execute on.
- If you want both the strategy and execution built and "done for you" as a whole package, contact Finmark for a success package, which combines a discovery session with an execution plan and also the implementation of it.
Example page of search showing Ads at the top & SEO results below.
