We’ve all seen those ads at the top of Google’s search results. They’re the paid for advertising that websites and marketers use to get surfers to visit a site and convert into memberships and sales. Today’s SEO isn’t enough to keep a company in the top rankings and a good marriage between SEO and AdWords is the best strategy.
Google AdWords allows for a better ROI overall. You’re literally getting what you paid for. In today’s marketing strategies, you want customers who not only visit your site but stay via joining your email lists and thus growing your customer base. AdWords is great for this because the money you spend secures your site in the top spots for your keywords, keyphrases, and keygroups, instead of the surfer having to meander through page after page of search results generated only by your SEO.
This doesn’t mean SEO is dead and ineffective, consider AdWords as that anchor you’ll need to make sure you’re getting quality traffic that is organic and targeted.
SEO is such an ever changing landscape nowadays that no one can predict what will happen next. It’s one battle after another trying to figure out the algorithm software Google uses and it’s at a point that SEO firms are constantly at one another’s throats to best the other. In all this chaos however, Google AdWords provides for a guaranteed spot but the battle isn’t won just by that. You need to bid on those keywords. Bigger companies spend incredible amounts of money for those top keywords and it’s now a cottage industry. They can afford to spend those six and seven figure investment dollars as they know they’ll make that money back several times over. The same with a smaller business that picks just the right keywords and knows how to use a budget wisely.
In order to make the best of this marriage, you’ll need to study how AdWords work. If you’re doing your own SEO you’ll need to coordinate all efforts with your AdWords campaign and keep an eye on your statistics several times a day. Just one error and you end up losing traffic and money.
You’ve got to use AdWords as a foundation and a fall back plan. At any moment Google can change their algorithms and your best SEO efforts crash. If you’re totally dependent on your SEO results and this happens, you’re in for a world of hurt. However, if you’ve got an active and robust AdWords strategy going on, you won’t lose all your investment and revenue and traffic, but have that as a shoring up of sorts until you can remedy your SEO problems.
Overall, it’s about planning and being realistic. With AdWords you’re guaranteed a top spot. It’s expensive but should be the bulk of your promotional budget. SEO is still valuable but because of the uncertainty of what the search engines will be looking for, it’s not wise to put the bulk of your budget on it. You can hedge your bet with SEO and Local SEO by learning how to do it yourself and making sure the fundamentals to it are well established and maintained. Saving money this way will allow you to spend more of your excess revenue on AdWords. Soon you’ll be able to measure the ratio of ROI. If you’re spending $500 on AdWords and making $1,000 back, you’re on the right track. Scale up gradually and take full responsibility with your statistics and you should do a-okay.
