Should Businesses Focus on SEO or Paid Advertising?

Millions of businesses are looking for customers whether it be big manufacturers or small tea shops. In this digital era, customers are everywhere, whether it be Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat or Instagram. How business can grow and scale their business, revenue, sales, and profit to the next level? How they can achieve huge success in this digital era? How to lower the expenses and take more money into a business bank account? Today in this blog post we will learn one of the most discussed topics, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) VS Paid Advertising.

What is SEO?

Simply put, search engine optimization is nothing but an optimization process of a website where we want as much visibility of our content, posts, and business on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and ChatGPT. Improved visibility can also called rankings or organic traffic. Organic traffic means free. For maximum visibility, we need to optimize websites so that businesses can grow their brand with fewer expenses on paid advertising. From Alt image text to keyword research and optimization, SEO covers a wide range of strategies and it is quite time-consuming as well as it takes time to come it full effect. The result can take from a couple of weeks to up to 6 months.

What is Paid Advertising?

If you pay any marketplace for the advertisement of your brand and/or company to bring more brand awareness, sales, traffic, engagement etc then it’s called paid marketing. Paid marketing can be online or offline. Online paid marketing is those that we pay, for instance; use Meta to advertise our brand/company to Meta users as a potential customer. Similarly offline marketing can be placing a billboard in high-traffic areas in the city.

Execution

Both SEO and paid advertising have different levels of execution. SEO is more complex as compared to paid advertising. Research keywords, phrases, keywords difficult, on-page, off-page, backlinks etc. The framework for SEO is deep and can take long days for execution. If properly executed the ROI is better than the paid media or advertising

Paid advertising is comparatively cheaper as you are paying data hubs like Facebook, Google, Snapchat, and TikTok certain money as paid advertising to show your brand, content, and business to potential consumers. Execution needs to be done very carefully for paid advertising as a company can face loss if we can’t optimize our advertising campaigns.

Time For Results

SEO can take quite a while to show results after you do optimizations. You have to also know all the Google SEO guidelines so that your optimization won’t be flagged by Google bots, which may hurt your SEO strategies and your business overall. You can expect results anywhere from 3 months to a year to fully get results in the case of SEO.

Paid advertising starts showing results within a week if not days. You are burning money to bring more traffic instead of organic traffic. That means you have to be very careful while doing paid advertising as you can start losing money if the advertising is not done by professional ad experts.

Benefits and Challenges of SEO

The benefits surpass the paid advertising but there are challenges to getting organic traffic through SEO.

Benefits

1. Free Traffic which means zero dollars on advertising cost
2. Building Trust and relationships is easier
3. Better conversion rate as being an authority business in that domain
4. Scaling chances go higher as more people share and like the organic content that ranks easily
5. Get high-quality traffic and leads free of cost
6. Cost-effective and better ROI

Challenges of SEO

1. AI has made challenges even bigger as most of the search engines give results in a summary which means less organic traffic.
2. Time-consuming, need to have patience
3. Have to put consistent effort into following all the search engine rules and policy updates
4. Stay up to date on the current trends, keywords, search phrases and more
5. Getting a backlink from credible sources is getting harder. You might have to pay for that.
6. Can have a negative impact if not done right which might be a serious issue in the long term.

Benefits and Challenges of Paid Marketing

Paid marketing has its own benefits if done right. We will also discuss some of the challenges faced with paid marketing.

Benefits

1. You can build the business quickly and go to market as soon as possible
2. Reach a wide range of audiences and potential customers which can be profitable if done right
3. You can get a measurable result from paid marketing like cost per lead, ROAS, etc which can help you to make decision in a quick basis
4. You can track your metrics fast and easily saving time
5. You can easily scale if your ads campaigns are performing well which means getting more sales and revenue in a shorter period of time. Scaling to the next level.

Challenges

1. Paid marketing can be expensive and budget can be an issue if not done right
2. Competition can make the paid ads more challenging and the margin can be less
3. Paid campaigns can be complex if not done by professionals.
4. Is more technical and time-sensitive as ads get older the audience interest may decline if proper action is not taken.

Conclusion

To conclude, what we want our clients and business professionals to do is use both of the approaches to get optimum results. SEO will gradually take the pace but use professionals to do the paid marketing so that they can get more value for their dollar and better ROI. Both approaches are necessary for a thriving business. You cannot wait for the SEO to take effect as other competitors are taking the market share through compelling paid ads. And also you mustn’t depend on paid ads only as SEO can bring you the better ROI in the long term. Building credibility and authority is the ultimate goal of any business.