Enhance your local visibility online and attract more customers by optimizing your Google Business Profile Product section. Video included!
Should you invest your time and resources in organic or paid search? The answer is both.
Product? Perfected. Message? Fine-tuned. Branding? Beautified. Now, it’s time to spread your seeds and find some leads.
In a digital marketer’s dream world, we’d snap our fingers and plant our promo on every channel, achieve a viral moment, and hit that number one spot for every relevant search. Oh, and budget? You’re not bridled by things like “budget.” That’s why you’ve got Rihanna on the line. Her long-anticipated next release is actually your product’s new jingle. You get to star in the music video — and you get to post it exclusively on your digital properties. Here come the sales! The conversion rate is off the charts!
And there goes your alarm…because that’s not how the real world, the Internet, your finance team, or Rihanna operates.
Instead, most marketers work with a fixed budget and must get crafty as they navigate seriously competitive, sometimes murky, digital waters. So, how do you allocate your budget to achieve maximum results and meet short-term and long-term goals?
Should you invest in SEO to boost organic search rankings? Should you allocate resources to paid search campaigns for immediate results? The research is conflicting, and every dollar counts. Spray paint is pretty cheap. Do you just forgo digital altogether and instead go guerrilla-marketing style, tagging your logo across city sidewalks?
GPO is here to settle the score once and for all: paid search vs. organic. (FYI: don’t do that spray paint thing without a permit.)
Hold up: you’re not facing an “either-or” scenario when choosing paid or organic. We highly recommend using both.
Organic and paid search are crucial to crafting a sustainable, comprehensive — and finance-team-friendly — digital marketing strategy. The two complement each other more than you’d think!
We’re here to break down the pros, cons, and use cases for each channel to help you better determine how to shape your digital marketing mix.
Organic search uses non-paid marketing tactics to improve online visibility. Your go-to moves include technical and content optimizations that help your website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords. Your goal is to make it easier for potential customers to find your products and business during discovery and the crucial Zero Moment of Truth: when they’re ready to convert.
Organic search’s strength lies in its ability to build trust and credibility over time. When users find your content organically, they often view it as more authoritative and trustworthy than paid ads.
A well-executed SEO strategy continually drives traffic to your site without ongoing or fluctuating costs. Even if you work with an agency, there’s a high chance you’ll know what your monthly retainer will be ahead of time. There’s no bidding to be done here, unlike with PPC, and therefore, there is less opportunity for your strategy to be thrown due to budget constraints.
Unlike PPC, your efforts will continue to live on your organic properties long term. You can create a wealth of information for your customers – and continuously increase your digital property’s relevance and potential ranking opportunities with each post or page of content.
Organic search requires a significant investment of time and effort before you start seeing results. It may take months for your content to climb the ranks in SERPs, but the payoff can be substantial as it continues to generate traffic long after it’s been published.
Compared to paid search, you have less direct control over where the algorithm will place you on the SERP. Getting onto page one will take great content and proper optimization, and you’ll need to make sure that the content you want to rank for is relevant to your existing content.
Paid search involves using paid advertising channels to target potential customers online. This typically includes running pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns on traditional search platforms like Google and Bing — and even social platforms where users search like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Regardless of the platform, the process for getting started with paid search is similar:
Unlike organic search, paid search allows you to achieve near-immediate visibility by placing your ads at the top of search engine results.
You can precisely target your ads based on demographics, locations, and even the time of day, ensuring they reach the right audience.
Paid search campaigns provide clear metrics, allowing you to track clicks, conversions, and the overall ROI of your efforts.
While paid search is excellent for driving quick traffic and conversions, these results are typically short-lived. Once you stop funding a paid campaign, the traffic it generates also stops.
Even if your campaign is well-structured and performs well, bid costs for keyphrases might already be high — and they can rise over time, too. Effective paid search efforts can be incredibly costly in an emerging, growing, or competitive industry market.
The average conversion rate of a PPC ad campaign is 2.35%. Cost-per-acquisition doesn’t always result in a positive ROI, so you need to consider your margins carefully.
A deep understanding of your target audience is crucial for paid search to be effective. Without clear insights, your ad spend could be wasted on audiences that don’t engage or convert.
Even with the best-targeted ads, if the landing pages they direct to aren’t optimized, your conversion rates will suffer. High-quality, relevant content is still necessary to keep potential customers engaged and lead them through the conversion funnel.
The real power of digital marketing comes from combining both organic and paid search strategies. Here’s why investing in both is crucial:
By utilizing both organic and paid search, you can dominate the SERPs, increasing your brand’s visibility and credibility across multiple channels. This dual approach ensures you’re reaching potential customers at every stage of their journey, from initial discovery to final purchase.
Paid search can offer valuable insights into which keywords and ad copy perform best, which you can then use to refine your SEO strategy for organic search.
Having strong organic search results can enhance the performance of your paid ads. Studies have shown that users are likelier to click on paid ads when the brand has a solid organic presence in the same SERP. This interplay between the two can boost overall click-through rates and improve your ROI.
SEO can take time to deliver sustainable results, but paid search can bridge the gap and provide immediate traffic while your organic rankings grow. As your organic presence strengthens, you can scale back on paid campaigns or refocus them on emerging initiatives, allowing for a balanced and flexible approach that adapts to your business needs.
While both organic search and paid search aim to improve your online visibility, they rely on different tactics and have different limitations.
Every marketing initiative doesn’t deserve the same treatment! Use these determining factors to decide the best method for your message here and now:
Organic search relies on non-paid strategies. While quality SEO work and content do cost time and money, it is typically less expensive to rank for terms organically than paid. Bid prices and the continual financial investment mean you may want to be more selective when using paid search to promote your brand and offerings.
Organic search is a long-term strategy. It often takes months to see results. However, those results can compound over time. Paid search delivers faster, more immediate results.
Users generally trust organic results more than paid ads, perceiving them as more unbiased and authoritative.
Paid or organic? The answer is that you need both. We’re here to help you create a more robust and effective digital marketing plan by strategically leveraging all aspects of search marketing.
We’re proven experts with decades of experience helping brands climb the SERP ranks with effective and actionable Organic Search plans and smart, SEO-optimized content solutions. And now, with our new paid search services, we can help you cover all your bases. Get in touch today to learn how to maximize your mix with GPO.
Enhance your local visibility online and attract more customers by optimizing your Google Business Profile Product section. Video included!
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Should you invest your time and resources in organic or paid search? The answer is both.