AdWords and SEO are the most powerful tools when it comes to search engine marketing, and knowing how to use them is integral to every successful marketing campaign.
Let’s have a look at whether they should be used together or separately, when and how to use them, and whether they are competitors or complementary tools.
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What does SEO do?
SEO stands for ‘search engine optimization’. Its whole purpose is for the content of your webpages to be search engine-friendly. This way, they’ll be easily found by your desired customers, which will also reward your website with better rankings.
Some of the most important SEO strategies include choosing relevant and effective keywords, linking your pages to external websites, and using meta tags and meta descriptions correctly. SEO works primarily with your content, seeking to make it relevant, consistent and easily found by those who are looking for it.
What is AdWords?
Compared to SEO, Google AdWords is much more similar to advertising. Through this platform, you can pay Google to advertise your websites, in order to place your pages at the top of the search results. It’s a pay-per-click system, so you’ll pay by the number of clicks on your ad.
Differences between SEO and AdWords: price
SEO is potentially free, except for the time spent working on it, as you can carry out the main tasks required to optimize your website. At least at the beginning, all you’ll need is a general understanding of the best practices used to optimize your content, find the right keywords, insert meta descriptions and build up a solid backlinking strategy. As your business develops, however, it will be necessary to pay for software and expertise in order to keep up with your competitors. Additionally, as your website grows SEO will become increasingly time-consuming, which is another reason to consider paying SEO experts to do the job.
Being a pay-per-click service, AdWords is more straightforward in this regard. You’ll simply have to decide how much you want to invest in advertising, according to the results you expect in terms of traffic to your website.
Short-term results
An AdWords campaign generates immediate results, as your website will be advertised straight away regardless of how small or new it is. Additionally, AdWords will bring your website to the first page of search engines.
Such result is much harder to achieve with SEO, and it will take week or months to see the benefits of an SEO campaign. Where the competition is very strong, getting the first page of a Google search might prove to be extremely hard even after having worked on SEO optimization for a long time.
Long-term results
AdWords doesn’t have long-lasting effects on your website or business. When your advertising campaign stops, your website will simply disappear from the first page of the search engines, and the traffic will decrease.
A well-planned SEO campaign, instead, will benefit your website little by little, providing long-lasting results.
AdWords or SEO for your website?
After comparing the differences between AdWords and SEO, the conclusion is that one shouldn’t choose one or the other. They are complementary tools, and they should be used to achieve different goals.
Investing money in an Adwords campaign is a good idea especially at the beginning of your business, when your website has just launched and is still growing. But don’t wait to start taking care of the SEO optimization of your content, as that is what you should count on for a long-lasting success of your business.