Before I dive into the nitty gritty, let’s clarify the difference between SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Google Adwords.
All major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo have primary search results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine feels is most relevant and authoritative. Google not only uses relevance as a factor in rank, but readability, reputation, security and quality of the site.
Google Adwords is a platform that allows companies to advertise their website in search results when a user searches for specific keywords. The company pays every time their ad is clicked on.
You’re probably thinking, “Give me one good reason why I should pay for visibility when I can get this for free?” Well, here are 4 of them:
Measurable and Flexible
One of the main advantages online marketing has over any traditional marketing channels, like TV or print, is that it’s extremely easy to measure. But it can get tricky to effectively measure your SEO campaign since you can’t always get a precise measurement on what has increased or decreased your rankings. Enter PPC or pay-per-click. Adwords comes equipped with plenty of metrics that do the task for you. In terms of flexibility, Adwords is customization features for your campaign to suit your company’s particular needs. For example, Adwords can be used to specify keyword match types and extensions that give you the ability to display everything from product images to contact information
Faster than SEO
The biggest draw back with SEO is that it takes months and months before you notice any results thanks to competitors and the time it takes to “prove itself”. This is not the case with Adwords. Once your campaign goes live, ads will appear and you’ll get instant results, like visitor data.
Not only will this bring in a little dough, but because of it’s speed, you have time to discover how effective your keywords are. This can then be used to construct an effective SEO campaign based on your Adwords Data.
More Engaging
Consider this: Youtube has over 1 billion users a month as well as several billion views a day. If you were to compare that to search engines, it would rank second and it’s 2x bigger than Bing or Yahoo searches combined. So why wouldn’t you want your ads to be where the people are?
Ability to control your costs
Here’s something really awesome about Adwords: you can set the maximum cost per day for your campaign. How does this help your business?
It allows you to budget your campaign accordingly without worrying if you’re breaking the bank. The worst case scenario is the amount of ads decreasing as your budget does. However, on the bright side, you can also increase your budget. This scalability is nifty when your company is looking to generate a lot of leads in a short amount of time.
