Paid search is an excellent way to get instant results for your campaign, and search engine optimization is an excellent long term strategy for organic search results.

There are pros and cons to both SEO and paid search campaigns.

Paid search is an excellent way to get instant results for your campaign, and search engine optimization is an excellent long term strategy for organic search results.

But which one is "better"? Here is what I suggest.

Paid search is better when:

  1. You have to move quickly

  2. You have a large daily budget of +$500/day

  3. You need instant results

Search engine optimization is better when:

  1. You have over 30 weeks let the pages rank organically

  2. You have a lower budget of between $1,000-5,000 per landing page

  3. You can wait for results and want to develop organic search results.

There are pros and cons to both SEO and paid search campaigns.

I recommend running your paid search campaign for 3 months while your search engine results take hold.

You're here because you are considering making a landing page and driving traffic to it, you’re just wondering which is better, paid search or using search engine optimization to build traffic organic search results.

My answer: If your budget is smaller (less than $100 per day on Google ads) I suggest starting with search engine optimized content to build your traffic.

I have a small PPC ad budget, will it work?

The issue with smaller budgets and paid advertising is that the volume of traffic is to low to build any significant information about your audience. Combine the lack of data with the new privacy features launched by Apple and Google and the audience that paid ads will bring in is extremely low quality.

If you compare most cost per click keywords, they start at roughly $2/click and up to as high as $48/click in some highly competitive niches. By those estimates, you’re only looking at 2-50 visits per day at a $100/day ad spend.

How can I save money on search engine marketing?

You can save a significant amount in the long term with search engine optimizing for your target audience in comparison. The reason is simple, you aim your SEO content at a set of 5-10 keywords, build your content score until it is over 75/100 and you will begin to start ranking on the first page of Google.

How do I target my audience with SEO?

By writing with SEO in mind, you know exactly what your audience is searching for and where they are going, where on the flip-side, Google and Facebook ads often drive useless traffic with poor keywords in order to build your clicks and impressions.

Why are my PPC ads working?

Paid search ads have become notoriously unreliable in the past couple of years. This is due to the privacy updates made by Apple and Google primarily. This is great for users, but awful for businesses. The problem is that PPC ads are easy to get up and running, but writing hundreds of thousands of words, and building thousands of pieces of content is both time and budget consuming.

What marketing channels should I use?

Search engine marketing channels are increasing all of the time, and I would suggest aiming for the majors, Google for SEO content, and YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram for paid search. If you combine organic content on LinkedIn and TikTok, this will be a great stack of platforms where you can distribute content.

PPC Campaigns, or pay per click campaigns, whether on Google, Facebook, Instagram, or any other platform have reduced their effectiveness in the past few years with the plethora of privacy features launched by Apple, and now Google. The cost per customer acquisition has increased significantly, from what I’ve been hearing from clients, it’s up an average of about 300%.

How do I increase organic traffic?

Organic traffic is built by using your expertise to write a large volume of relevant content, authority where many other websites are linking to your content, and trustworthiness which is when you have a large volume of content, reviews, and mentions on other websites.

Can I use both PPC and organic search traffic?

Your marketing strategy should include both PPC (in the beginning to get instant results) and SEO content writing for ongoing results.

Google Search is still the top source for organic search and delivers excellent traffic when you correctly target the audience with your marketing strategy. The appeal for optimizing content for search engines has increased significantly with the dramatic rise in customer acquisition cost using paid ads.

How much will SEO and paid search marketing cost?

SEO Strategy is the way to go in my opinion, starting with a paid search strategy for the first 3-6 months while your SEO strategy starts to build organic search traffic. By doing this technique you can get great initial traffic at the $5,000/month range with paid search, while your organic search traffic builds, then begin scaling back your paid search ads.

Paid search marketing strategy does work at higher budgets, if for example, you have a $50,000-100,000/month budget, then complimenting great content, and blasting your message out there will get you sales. The problem becomes sustainability of using paid search, if you have a down month or two, it can really eat into your budget.

Search engine results page ranking is critical to your content to remove your dependence on paid traffic. As Google only indexes about 4% of the internet, the other 96% must pay in order to build their traffic, when you have this volume of paid search marketing, the cost for search ads becomes prohibitive in the long term.

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Should I do paid search or SEO?

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