Every person who runs a website has this basic dilemma: do you attract people into your site using a strategic search engine marketing approach or do you pay for advertising that will drive the most traffic that’s most likely to buy.
What are the advantages of each approach?
Search engine marketing, commonly called SEO, drives inbound traffic. Why does that work? There are literally thousands of people that are searching for the very products and ideas that you are promoting. Every day they go to one of the search engines and initiate a search. We even use the term “Google” to describe that very action. But there are also thousands of sites that can be ranked for that search. It is your job to find out which terms are used in the search and include those terms in your site’s copy. Your strategy is to understand the market and place your site into the highest ranking for the terms that you believe will sell your ideas and products. Using SEO you will pay less for the viewers that you attract, but the approach is very broadly based. All of the traffic is based on the action of the target audience. They must be using the search terms that you have used for your site.
Paid advertising, on the other hand, allows you to target an audience that may not be searching for your products and ideas. Based on the demographics of the target audience, you pay to place your ad in front of the audience most likely to buy your product or idea.
Which works better? They both work. Use SEO to establish a stream of searchers that your site must convert to buyers. Use ads to put your message in front of the most likely target audience.