SEO vs Paid Advertising: Which is the Best Marketing Strategy for Your Business?

Show Notes

EP101 Transcript

SEO vs Paid Advertising

Today’s Seven Minute Bingeable podcast episode is all about SEO versus paid advertising. We’ll discuss the pros and cons of each and give you the knowledge you need to make an educated decision on which is the best marketing strategy for your business. Tune in now to find out which one you should invest in.

Welcome to the Grinding Grow Marketing Show, your show for bingeable marketing strategies to accelerate your business growth, delivered in short and impactful seven minute weekly episodes. I’m Brad Ball, founder of Liquis Digital, a marketing agency helping businesses grow since 2000. Thanks for joining us today, and don’t forget to subscribe now.

Let’s grow.

Hello and welcome back to another episode the Grinding Grow Marketing Show, today we are talking about SEO versus paid ads. So let’s jump in. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Basically what this is you are optimizing your content and your website to show up in the search engines organically.

So when someone search. For you, your service or your business, you show up in what they call the erp, the search engine results page. That is essentially what SEO is. Paid ads is where you pay to show up. So paid ads is basically if you’re running paid ads in Google. So let’s say you’re running a paid Google search ad.

When someone searches a keyword phrase that you are targeting, then your ad is gonna show. and your business is gonna show up because you’re paying to show up and it’s gonna even say it’s sponsored or an ad. So it’s gonna, no, it’s an, or people will know it’s an ad, but if the ad’s done well, it’ll entice them to click through.

So that’s a paid ad. And then you have social ads, so running ads on Instagram or Facebook where your ad is just in their feed. Which one is best for you? There’s a few things that you should consider in answering this question. The first thing is, what are your goals? Because ads and SEO are going to really depend on what your goals are.

So if your goals is to get leads and get business now and fast, then ads is probably. Bet because your ads are gonna get your results within one to two weeks. Soon as you turn on your ads, you’re gonna start getting results. For the most part, if you’re doing it right, that’s ads. You’re gonna get instant results.

SEO is gonna take time. It could be three to six months or at the earliest before you start seeing the results of all of the work that you’re putting. It depends. There’s like short-term and then there’s long-term. So SEO is long-term. Ads are short-term, and we’re talking results, right? Getting your results.

The other thing to think about is the lifecycle for both, so when we think of lifecycle, like how long does it last? So you put all this work and effort and energy into it, how long is it going to live and be there working for you? . When we’re talking paid ads, you’re gonna get your results quicker, but as soon as you stop feeding the machine, the ads stop.

So there is really, is the life cycle is just dependent on how, for how long you wanna continue to pay. So it’s immediate. So if you stop running the ad, it stops showing to people versus seo? Yes, it does take longer to get results, but it lasts for. So when you get an SEO strategy going, you get good rankings.

You know those rankings are gonna be up there for a lot longer. So you’re gonna continue to re the rewards of your SEO efforts. The next thing to consider is, The cost, right? So what does it cost to do SEO and what does it cost to do paid ads? I’d like to say SEO is free, but it’s really not, right? So yeah, you’re not paying to be to show up, but time is money, right?

So you still have to put in time to get results. So time is money. And you might also have to be paying a professional to do things for you, such as creating content, optimizing your content or your website, doing those types of things. Getting back links or whatever. And there’s also the cost of tools.

So if you’re doing, using certain tools to get certain information or to do certain things, then obviously you’re going to have a. There now, paid ads, of course, is not free as it is in its name you are paying to play. So the more you spend, the more results you get, but you have to spend to get results. So obviously the cost is, dependent on how much you wanna spend.

A common question we get is, how much should I be spending on my ads? So the typical answer is, or the recommendation out there in general is five to 10% of your sales should go toward advertising or marketing. If you think about, okay, what are five to 10% of my sales? That would be around maybe what would be a good budget to spend?

Not to say it has to be, but that’s a guideline. The other thing to think about is your visitor’s intent. And their knowledge of your service. So if you are a painter or a chiropractor, or a dentist or an AC repairman, your services are known. Anyone who has that would need your services will already know that they have the problem and they need you.

So if my AC goes out, I know I need an AC guy. If you know if back hurts, I know I need a chiropractor. So I know I have a problem. I know who’s, I’m gonna go to find the solution. But let’s say you have a new product people don’t even know about. I may not know to Google or to search for what you are offering, so I might not search may not be the best place to go or to paid ads, right?

So if I’m gonna try to place an ad in front of you because you’re gonna search for it what if you’re not searching for. Because you don’t know about it. So in this case, SEO might be better because there’s other ways to get in front of people so you can start creating problem aware content that is, five ways to fix your back pain, or then things to do to, fix your AC or to, keep your AC running cold all summer long, whatever, right?

So you can start creating this problem where content and giving them inform. And then now you’re getting in front of them. So that is some things to consider when you go out to think about SEO versus paid ads. And to be honest, I wouldn’t say go one or the other. I would say, look at your goals and see what fits best.

And it might be a blend of both. Anyway, that wraps us up for today’s episode. If you have any questions on this, please don’t hesitate to reach out. You can join our Facebook community and ask questions there, and we’ll see you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening in today, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss what we have in store for you next. And if you’ve enjoyed this episode, we’d love your support. Please leave us a rating and review. It only takes 10 seconds. And we’ll catch you in the next episode.