Adwords or SEO – which to choose?
Which to chose, Adwords or SEO, if you only have a limited Budget. and we’ll talk about Budgets in a bit as well.
Basically, the answer is simple, Adwords should be treated at the shortcut way to getting ranked for keywords you feel you’re missing out on. We at NCompass have a number of criteria milestones that dictate whether we recommend Adwords or SEO.
- If the website is brand new – we’ll always recommend Adwords – especially if budget constraints means you need to choose one or the other.In short, Adwords should bring immediate results and the great thing is that you get a qualified audience – if someone is looking for ‘teaspoons’ and your website sells ‘teaspoons’, in theory, why would they not buy from you.What you are testing, is whether your website has the potential to convert. Will people be able to work out how to ‘Add to Basket’ or ‘Checkout’, if you cannot get people to ‘convert’ with Adwords on a brand new website, you need to ask why not?
- Long Term or Short Term. Adwords is short term, if you want a long-term solution then SEO is going to be better., you cannot switch SEO on and off as you can with Adwords, therefore you want to be thinking of building up traffic to your website over time. SEO is an investment in the future.
- Niche Marketing – Many websites will show up just fine for their Brand Name or their core products. However, Adwords come in very useful if you are targeting a specific addon product or some part of the website that is not covered by SEO.A cynic would also suggest that Google themselves will give you more credit for specific keywords in SEO terms if you advertise on Adwords for those terms. So Adwords is a good way to boost advertising in places that SEO does not reach.
I know these pointers appear fairly straightforward – however, both SEO and Adwords have their specific uses and with a limited Budget it’s important to choose wisely.
Budgets for Adwords and SEO
There is a difference. With Adwords you can start with a small Budget, we accept clients who want to spend as little as £100 per month on Advertising. Equally, if you’re doing well and there is a clear ROI on Adwords, there is nothing to stop you spending more. And Google welcome clients spending thousands and thousands on Adwords. There is no limit.
SEO is more tricky to ascertain. In short, you cannot spend more than a reasonable amount on SEO, anything between £200 and £2000 per month is probably justified.
But, SEO is a bedrock of marketing when it comes to a website. From SEO comes all the rest of the Marketing world. SEO, for us at NCompass is nearly always the bedrock of everything else. You might limit your Budget on SEO, but that does not mean your budget is limited for Marketing:
- Adwords – you might be looking to reach keywords on Google that are difficult to rach via SEO
- Blogging and Content Creation – SEO depends on a websites ability to provide fresh content.
- Social Media – not to be counted as SEO, but nonetheless provides a great source of traffic for a website
- Advertising in general, whether in Print, Radio, TV or in other digital forms
- Partnering with other companies, the ultimate ‘you scratch my backl, I’ll scratch yours’ means better SEO.
- Newsletters and vibe, SEO demands content, which galvanises marketing teams across an organisation.
In short SEO has the ability to affect every form of marketing within an organisation.
Adwords or SEO – which to Choose?
In short, both hav etheir place, neither is limited by Budget, all we can really say is that when starting out, is the key time to decide which to choose. Both is always good, but if you have a new website – almost certainly we would suggest a small Adwords Campaign to get you going.