SEO or AdWords
The big question on the minds of marketing managers and business founders is whether to invest in an SEO or Adwords strategy. Both are part of SEM (Search Engine Marketing), but offer very different advantages, and we’ll take you through them. Defining campaign types SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is also known as natural search engine […]
The big question on the minds of marketing managers and business founders is whether to invest in an SEO or Adwords strategy. Both are part of SEM (Search Engine Marketing), but offer very different advantages, and we’ll take you through them.
Defining campaign types
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is also known as natural search engine optimization, because the search engines decide which position to give based on the quality, interest and relevance of the content. It’s the most important strategy, but also the most difficult to achieve.
SEA (Search Engine Advertising) is paid advertising on search engines, and breaks down into the purchase of Adwords and banners, which are advertisements displayed on pages visited by Internet users. SEA does not improve SEO directly, but indirectly.
Selection criteria
Financial investment
Organic SEO is considered free, but it does require an investment in time that can be even more expensive than a paid campaign. The investment is mainly at the start, to position your site or page, and then decreases to become maintenance later on.
Someone with time and little capital is therefore better off starting with SEO and waiting for the money to come in, before investing in SEA with the income generated by SEO. On the other hand, a company with a budget may be well advised to invest in SEA, which will cost less than content creation, but that’s not the only criterion to bear in mind.
Targeting customers
SEO targets customers only loosely, depending on the SEO title chosen and Google’s secret algorithm, whereas SEA offers precise targets. With AdWords, you can even target the e-mail addresses in your customer file, or the residents of a specific geographical area. On the other hand, you’re limited to the area you’re paying for, whereas SEO allows you to reach a wider but more diffuse audience, so the two are complementary.
Targeting customer requests
SEO only allows you to control the SEO title, the meta description and the keywords in your content, but you don’t have complete control of it, since Google arrogates to itself the right to modify your meta description according to the customer’s request.
AdWords, on the other hand, lets you choose the queries for which the ad will appear, even controlling the snippet ‘s title and meta description to ensure that what you’re advertising appears.
Let’s take an example: if you offer mortgages in a specific city, it will be very difficult to target your customers with SEO because they probably won’t type the word mortgage. However, with AdWords, you can create ads containing the meta description “best mortgage rate for house purchase” that will come up when your customers type “search house city X”. So you can position yourself wherever you want. You can try to do this with SEO, but the result will be more difficult and uncertain.
Time to get results on the web
The popular belief is that SEO takes time to achieve results, but this is partly true, partly false. While it takes time to position a site well, it’s possible to get a page to the top of Google in a matter of seconds. It’s truer to say that results fluctuate, with queries often initially ranking well, then dropping back, only to rise again slowly. AdWords, on the other hand, allow you to position yourself immediately on the first page of Google, Bing or Yahoo, depending on the bid you agree to pay. The percentage of time your ad is displayed over a day depends on the budget you allocate and the number of clicks. In short, SEA gives you the security of immediate positioning, provided you pay for it.
Campaign duration over time
SEA campaigns are time-defined, starting immediately and lasting only as long as you pay for them. Natural referencing, on the other hand, lasts over time, provided that the site is active, i.e. that you publish on it, that it is visited and that visitors cite it as a reference.
Control
Generally speaking, SEO gives you little control: it’s the search engine that decides your positioning and sometimes even the meta tag, whereas Adwords gives you total control.
CTR
The CTR (Click Through Rate) is generally higher in SEO, visitors are more inclined to click on a natural snippet than a paid one, because they’re more likely to come across a relevant link, the search engine has done the work for them, good positioning gives us a better chance of finding a relevant page, which isn’t always the case with paid ads, and many web users refuse to use them.
Of course, the click-through rate depends on the quality of the SEO work, but on our site the average is around 4.9%, while on AdWord campaigns the rates are around 2.2%. Both rates are very acceptable, but organic referencing gives results about twice as good.
The number of keywords
A campaign requiring a limited number of keywords is easy and affordable with AdWords, while SEO allows you to reach a much wider audience.
Summary of SEO and SEA characteristics
SEO
- King positioning, because natural, more credibility for Internet users. The two dream positions are position 0, also known as featured snippet, or first place.
- Action over time
- Broad targeting
- Free, but an investment compared to AdWords?
- Senior CTR
- For campaigns with many keywords
- High initial budget, maintenance later on
- Duration in time if maintenance
SEA – Adwords
- Good control
- Immediate results
- Lower CTR than SEO
- Price per Click = PPC
- Constant budget
- Statistical calculation of return on investment.
- Short-term campaigns: product launches, certain periods of the year
- Precise targeting
- Allows you to better measure which keywords work and then use them in SEO
- Possibility of choosing keywords with a different snippet title to attract users with related searches
- Precise geographic targeting
- Cost calculation based on 3 criteria: keyword competition, bids, budget
- Duration linked to budget period
- Helps improve SEO indirectly
- Generate clicks and visibility
- Corrects a bad SEO position
- Display banners help determine which sites generate the most clicks and CTRs
Running paid campaigns is quite technical and not always pleasant, but we advise you to take an AdWords – SEA training course, if only to understand your agency’s strategy and, above all, to avoid being ripped off, as many companies have been in the past.
In conclusion
Your priorities and budget will allow you to choose between SEO and SEA, but the ideal is to combine the two for a global web strategy, and then, if you can appear twice on the first page of Google, it’s to your advantage!
Jean-Pierre Mercier