What is SEO and is it better than paid ads?
SEO is the process of improving a website’s visibility on search engines. SEO promotes your business and brand in natural or organic ways instead of spending money advertising. SEO aims to earn, not pay for rankings that are created by SEO itself. SEO helps in long-term traffic growth that can be sustained for months or years not just days or weeks (depending on the SEO strategy used).
The benefits of SEO compared to paid advertising: SEO helps build trust and credibility with real visitors from targeted online channels such as social media sites, blogs, and forums bringing customers to relevant content by increasing organic traffic. PPC advertisements only bring people who don’t necessarily care about your brand but maybe looking for something specific that’s related to yours. That being said, PPC delivers immediate results but SEO takes a lot longer. SEO is a long-term investment. SEO gives freedom to update content without worrying about its ranking and SEO keeps your rankings steady when Google’s algorithm changes (which it does constantly). PPC requires paid advertising budget every month which can be thousands of dollars depending on the competition level (depending also on how much you pay per click). SEO costs basically only time and effort. SEO is safe for non-e-commerce sites, we don’t recommend SEO for eCommerce sites until they reach significant customer turnover so that the site can cover at least some of SEO expenses. For non-eCommerce sites, this means that there is no financial risk involved.
While SEO is a long-term solution, paid ads deliver immediate results for a short period of time. If you compare SEO vs PPC as a marketing activity, Google is promoting PPC with their advertising products and platforms (Adwords, Adsense) constantly pushing advertisers to pay for ads.
“SEO is the reason why businesses with no money rank higher than google’s paid ads” by Danny Sullivan
This is not entirely true. It only works if google search users are in need of your product type but not a particular service that google has promoted for a specific country or language group by putting it at top of the google results page. That is how SEO works – try a google image search where all images are from websites that were ranked before google ad words were introduced and see how they look like nowadays. While this may be an issue for Google, this is actually a good thing for google users. This way Google will be able to promote quality pages that it thinks are the best ones by using google ads as an indicator of what people choose to click on. In other words, the Google search algorithm is self-adjusting based on google ads users choices
One more reason why SEO should not be ignored: Recently google announced more restrictions on AdWords campaigns in order to give less money to PPC marketing companies and more back to website owners who do marketing themselves without spending their money for PPC advertisements. If you run your own business online – then chances are Google will eventually reward you with higher rankings if people find your content useful and trustworthy enough from their point of view. Ranking #1 is incredibly important for any online business mainly because google search shows the links to multiple other websites in your Google listing.
– google ads costs money and you don’t know when Google will change its rules, requiring PPC companies to pay more for google ads
– Google AdWords competition is high – this makes it harder to get a decent ranking
– by hiring an SEO company you can enjoy immediate results that bring you:
If you are looking to hire an SEO or Adwords company in Virginia, we recommend Spark Factory. They have 20+ years of SEO experience and are a google premier partner which means they are in the top 3% of agencies globally.
They take pride in their SEO, Google Adwords, google analytics, google app engine and google webmaster services.
Spark Factory has offices in Virginia Beach and Philadelphia. They are happy to come to your location for an initial consultation so you can meet them face to face if that is more convenient for you – just let them know when booking your appointment.
If you would like Spark Factory to help increase online sales by using search engine marketing. If you would like them to audit your google PPC campaign… if you are looking for google marketing strategies that will work in your business environment, then
