Over the years, SEO vs paid search has been a matter of fierce debate. Either one has its pros and cons. SEO brings organic traffic to business websites with months of constant effort, whereas paid search is the best way to get quick, instant, and targeted traffic on your business website.
Why SEO is a Viable Marketing Strategy?
For Google, content is something of utmost importance. Google crawlers are intelligent enough to find content that matches the user’s query. They look for content that provides impeccable value for the readers.
For online businesses, SEO is an incredibly effective tool that helps brands to improve visibility and increase audience engagement. If implemented with a proper strategy and planning, SEO can bring in sustainable and long-term results.
SEO Vs PPC
If you’re familiar with the Google search, you must have seen advertisements on top of these search results pages, this is the pay-per-click advertising. This is a popular advertisement model used by businesses where an advertiser pays for each click made on the ad.
The visible difference that you need to see is that paid traffic lasts until the budget exhausts. The more budget you allocate to the paid ads, the more clicks you can get. Unlikely, SEO glues together several proven strategies to attract targeted traffic on your select keywords.
Why SEO is a Sustainable Strategy?
Via this blog post, I will look into the several aspects together. Read on to understand why SEO is important, how it’s different from paid search, and why it’s recommended to rely on SEO over a paid search-based marketing strategy.
SEO Brings Massive Organic Traffic
The right SEO strategy can bring in a lot of organic and targeted traffic. The strategy helps you rank your most important keywords in organic search. It is estimated that organic search drives over 50% of website traffic.
On the other hand, the contribution of paid search to website traffic is less than 27%. This drop happens as people use ad blockers to block advertisements on Google.
Try to rank your keywords on the first page of Google. The results shown on the first page receive about 92 % of all the traffic. Moreover, almost one-third of all clicks go to the first result on the organic search pages.
SEO has a high ROI
SEO puts together a group of activities that help brands rank web pages in SERPs. That may include producing awesome content, conducting exhaustive keyword research, and having a perfect internal linking structure.
If all these activities are bundled together in a planned manner, SEO can provide a high Return on Investment (ROI) and more conversion.
But to see your SEO flourish, you have to consistently work on your content and internal linking. If you manage to update your content frequently to make it fresh and relevant, Google will show your content in the results. The more you will be discoverable, the more you’ll continue to see your ROI growing.
Only the best content can attract people and convince them to buy from you. It can work magic. Even paid ads can’t help you that much. Write your best content. Turn this copy into SEO-friendly content. It will help you rank in the search engines and drive massive visitor traffic.
SEO Impacts the Buying Cycle
Search intent is another thing that distinguishes SEO from paid search. People searching in Google have a specific goal to achieve. This audience is highly motivated whose chances to buy your product are likely high. It’s easier to convince a person to buy your product who is already interested in your product.
You have to make sure that your target audience must find your website easily if they are looking to buy a product you sell. Optimize your website for your most competitive keywords to improve your buying cycle.
Google Algorithms are Evolving
Over the years SEO has evolved a lot. Its algorithms and updates are getting smarter in understanding the user intent and context. Google never fails to identify quality content and a webpage with perfect schema.org implementation to create rich snippets.
Rich snippets are estimated to have a 58% click-through rate. Google considers over 200+ ranking signals to rank a web page in search engine result pages. Decoding these signals is a complex task.
The more you refine your SEO strategy as per your understanding of these signals, the more you will be able to outrank the competition and rank higher.
An SEO tool can tender a helping hand in reaching your marketing efforts. Take advantage of SEO tools like SEMRush or Ahref to empower your SEO strategy and scale higher.
Conclusion
SEO is different from paid ads in many ways. Though both methods are intended to bring targeted traffic to your website, SEO is completely organic whereas paid advertisements are dependent on the budget allocated.
The traffic that SEO attracts is free, targeted, and lasts long term, while the traffic with paid search is expensive and sometimes random.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.