Adwords Campaign or Organic Development

When generating traffic for a website it is often wondered which one is more beneficial, spending your money on a Adwords Campaign or Organic Development. Should you invest money monthly into Adwords where after you stop your campaigns your traffic plummets back down to where you began. Or should you invest your money into Organic Development where the results are slow but steady and will continue to generate steady traffic after completion. 

Adwords Campaign:
Google Adwords lets you purchase inbound traffic on an Cost Per Click basis, or a Cost Per Mille (Cost Per Thousand Impressions). This is an almost instant gratification process where after starting your campaign Google will display your Ads until you have reached your preset daily spending limit. These campaigns can be great for companies that can afford good Adwords rankings, and have great conversion rates. Another Advantage is that Adwords do not necessarily require changes to your website or any web development to get started. Google Adwords also lets you geographically pinpoint your paid traffic down to a city. This is great for local businesses that are looking for traffic locally to gain business around there business. Although this is a great way to get traffic instantly, once your campaign is over, the traffic will hit a cliff. You might get a few new links because of your sites exposure, but nothing significant. 

Organic Development:
Organic Development is the process of developing an SEO strategy and a plan to increase your traffic organically through SERP(Search Engine Results Pages). This is not an instant gratification process and will take months to pay off. This will require anywhere from a little work, to a big job on your website to be able to update your site for your strategies. Although the payoff comes later, and it takes actual site work to do, this does produce the best kind of traffic, organic. This means that clicks do not cost you anything at all. If you are getting 100 clicks a day from Adwords that can cost you anywhere from $100+. If you are getting 10,000 clicks a day from organic it will cost you nothing. Most SEO campaigns will require an revamp upfront, and then small monthly updates to keep your site fresh and to keep on top of your keywords and phrases. 

So which is best?
So now you know a little about both, which one is better? Adwords Campaign or Organic Development? This is not so much a black and white answer as I would like it to be. If you are familiar with Analytics and are running conversion rates you can see if Adwords would benefit you. If you are getting enough conversion to pay for Adwords and still turn a profit, it would be a good idea to start a decent sized Adwords campaign. If you do not make a conversion rate that will cover your Adwords costs its probably not a great idea to start spending money you arent going to get back.  A SEO strategy and improvement plan can be free if you do it yourself. All you need to do is read around on how SEO works and some good tips and tricks that can easily help your SEO efforts. Comb through your site carefully and find all the spots where you can imporve, get them all in order and do it yourself or hire a developer to go in and update all your things at one time. This shouldnt cost you a whole lot. If you want to start learning about SEO, here are 20 SEO tips and tricks.

All in all, if you have a conversion rate to be able to run Adwords, by all means do so. Even if you are not making tons of profit you are still exposing your brand. This will produce return customers and referral business. If you are running Adwords spend some time to help your organic SEO efforts also. This will help you get even more organic traffic on top of your Adwords campaigns. If your conversion rates are not good enough, work on doing some SEO and try to get your site higher organically, which is free clicks.

Tags | adwords, seo