SEO vs paid advertising

Paid or organic advertising? Discover the differences between SEO and paid advertising, and which marketing strategy is the best fit for you

When googling ways to make your website more visible, you’ll often be bombarded with technical terms and ‘best solutions’. SEO, paid advertising, Google Business Profile, social media management, you name it, there will be hundreds of articles talking about it. But, what are all those things, what are the key differences and which strategy is the best fit for you? If you are interested in the last two strategies, check out our blogposts about the importance of a Google Business Profile and the advantages of social media marketing. In this blogpost, we’ll do a deep-dive into the key differences between SEO and paid advertising.

What is what?

Let’s start right at the beginning, what is SEO and what is paid advertising?

What is SEO?

We define SEO, short for Search Engine Optimisation, as ‘a branch of internet marketing that embodies all efforts to improve a website’. Of course, this is a very superficial definition, an effective, long-lasting SEO-strategy involves many factors and variables, but those details will be discussed in a later blogpost.

What is paid advertising?

You might have already guessed, but paid advertising is any kind of marketing where you pay for either visibility or for any action taken directly from that ad. This can be through SEA, but also via paid posts on social media or even ads on radio or television.

SEO vs paid advertising

Now that we’ve refreshed our memories on what is what again, we can take a look at the differences between SEO and paid advertising.

Paid, or not

The first, and most prominent difference is if you pay for your online visibility or not. With paid advertising, you get charged for, depending on the platform, every click, view, inquiry, etc. Every new client will cost you money to acquire. Improving your website through SEO will attract more organic traffic.

You might be thinking: “Yes, but hiring an SEO expert also costs money.” You’re right! Hiring someone to design and implement an SEO-strategy for you will, of course, cost you money. And even when you decide to get writing yourself, this will take a lot of time and effort. Time and effort you cannot spend on anything else.

So, the difference lies in what exactly it is you’re paying for. With paid advertising, you pay to have your website or advert visibly displayed on social media or in the search results. When you focus on SEO, you pay to have changes made to your website that will cause it to be more visible ‘by itself’.

Quick results, or a little slower

Another clear difference is how quickly you’ll see the results of your efforts. You’ll get the fastest results from paid advertising. As soon as you activate your campaign or advert, you’ll be visible to your audience. An SEO-strategy needs a bit more time to show clear results. That is mainly because there is a lot of work to be done before any changes can be made to your website. If you want to do that work properly, you’ll soon be looking at a few weeks of preparation. When you then make the technical changes and upload the new content to the right webpages, you’ll start to see a slow but steady increase in your visibility.

Long-lasting, or temporary results

Even though paid advertising, like SEA, or social media advertising, will give you quick results, they are all temporary. If you stop paying, you’ll no longer be visible. Even if you only lower your budget, you will immediately see the difference in the amount of visitors you get to your website. SEO may need more time before your strategy starts showing results, but it’ll last you a lot longer.

The first few weeks and months of any SEO-strategy are the most labour-intensive. You have to do all of the preparation, make the changes to your website and content, and keep a close eye on any developments. A spike in your search result positions is a frequent phenomenon right after uploading new content. This happens because search engines generally like to ‘push’ new pages or texts slightly more than older content that hasn’t been changed in a while. (Of course, there are certain exceptions!) So, it’s of utmost importance to react as soon as you see any stagnation, and make sure that your content and website stay relevant, and continue to score on the first page of search results.

Chose your target audience

One of the most important deciding factors in any marketing strategy is to have a clear target audience. Exactly how you narrow down your target audience and why it’s such an important step, we’ll explain soon. For now, it’s enough to know that advertising at random will have little to no effect, and will give you very few valuable leads. SEO and paid advertising strategies can both cater to your target audience, but there are some clear differences.

Many advertising-platforms will give you the possibility to change various metrics to make sure your ad reaches the right people. Set the age, gender, location, language, etc. of your audience and your ad will only be shown to people that fall into those categories.

To reach your target audience through SEO, you’ll have to work differently. Once again, the preparation is key here. Keep your audience in mind while researching keywords and emphasise the words they actually use. Rework your web texts and even the look and feel of your website to further target exactly the right people.

Which strategy is best? SEO or paid advertising?

Both marketing strategies have pros and cons, so which one is the best fit for you? Actually both! The best way to be visible at all times, is to combine SEO and paid advertising in your marketing strategy. Your paid adverts will give your website more traffic while you’re working on your new and improved content, and will also fill any gaps in your organic visibility for certain keywords. As soon as your SEO-efforts start bearing fruit, you can edit your advertising campaigns to focus on different keywords, or lower your ad-budget.

Need some help? Get in touch! We’ll happily take care of your SEO-strategy, or the management of your paid advertising!