SEO or Adwords - Which is most useful?

[luke_thomasuk]

I have recently designed a website and now need to start pulling in sales from it.

At the moment i'm ranked on the 9th page of the Google search and have my adwords campaign showing on the first page.

I haven't had much of an increase in sales from either.

What I'd like to know is whether my money would be better spent increasing my Adwords campaign coverage and budget or to employ an SEO company to try to get me to the first page of the Google search.

The search is relating to accountancy services so it is quite competitive.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[James]

If your Adwords already has you on the front page and you are getting visitors to the site but they are not buying then no amount of SEO is going to help.

If people are not buying but are visiting your site then there is a reason why! Maybe the site is difficult to navigate, maybe there are not enough products on the site, maybe your prices are to high, maybe the product is boring. All these factors can stop you getting sales from your site visitors.

If you are not getting visitors to the site, maybe your using the wrong adwords, and you can do basic SEO yourself before commiting a ton of money to an SEO company.

Ensure each page has its own unique title, and meta description, all images should have ALT / Title tags, keywords should be repeated in the visible text on the page. etc

Good luck anyway

[Mehboob]

Many people when they first start out to promote their website realise that Google is the search engine they need to concentrate on because it has the largest market share of traffic overall. However they are then faced with the choice. Do they use SEO as their route to web traffic or Google Adwords.

In an ideal world where time and money are limitless then doing both would be the obvious choice. However in the real world choices need to be made so which one is best?

In my opinion I think it depends on your current needs and circumstances. Generally if you are looking to generate traffic quickly and can afford an advertising budget then my preference would be to concentrate on Google Adwords. Certainly if your website is brand new then SEO is probably not the route for you as it can take some months before Google will take new sites seriously enough to rank them for their organic searches.

However if you have a longer term goal (or no money!) and you can live without much Google traffic for a few months then SEO could be just the ticket because once the traffic starts to roll in it will be free traffic and that is always good for your return on investment figures.

However let's add a little more detail on the choice. I've listed a few of the key comparison items below that I hope will help you decide on the right approach for your current needs.

Price:

SEO is technically free if you do it yourself. I say "technically" because it will still require a lot of your time and as the saying goes, Time is Money! Also, you will probably want to pay for a subscription to some of the better directories for your chosen business. Certainly you will want to consider the Yahoo directory which is a few hundred dollars last time I looked.

Adwords obviously isn't free although you can set daily budgets. Unfortunately it's very easy to spend money with Adwords and for the undisciplined it's very easy to spend too much money!

Speed:

Adwords wins hands down here. An Ad from Adwords can be created and will start sending you traffic in minutes. SEO on the other hand can take weeks or even months to start to send you anything approaching decent traffic.

Competition:

Which of the two options has the most people competing for your keywords? In my view Adwords is less competitive than SEO. It's usually far easier to get your keywords to the top position in Adwords than it is using SEO techniques. Like all things there are going to be exceptions but personally I can get my keywords ranking in the top spots far quicker with Adwords than I can with SEO. Some will argue that you just buy yourself to the top of the Adwords lists with expensive clicks but I don't agree. I can get to the top with some sensible bid prices and good Adwords management.

Ongoing Maintenance:

Again, this is my personal opinion but I think Adwords requires more ongoing continued effort to maintain the top spot for your keywords than SEO does. I imagine quite a few SEO experts might argue with this but I have some top performing SEO pages that I rarely touch and they still dominate for their keywords. In fact I know people who have top performing pages who are scared to touch them in case they move down the rankings. That said, I'll admit that SEO requires significantly more work initially to get those top spots.

In terms of Adwords, to keep your campaigns performing well you should be checking them often. For me this means every day so that's why I say that I feel it requires more continued effort. Then again, there is always new links to acquire with SEO but generally once you have a top position links tend to find you.

In conclusion, I'd suggest going to Adwords if you are in a hurry and have a budget. If you have more time initially to get your traffic then SEO would seem to be your choice. That said, even if you choose Adwords as your preferred route, I would still get some basic on page SEO knowledge because this will help greatly when you write your landing pages for Adwords. By on page SEO, I basically mean how to write your pages so that they are optimised for your chosen keywords.

[Benjamin J K]

Well, since you have designed a website regarding accountancy services. I would suggest that you should not depend only on adwords or SEO. Well both are good websites for advertisements. but the only way you can get traffic to you website is to publish your websites in free classifieds. And i am pretty sure that you will get more traffic in your website. So when you get more traffic people will use your services and automatically you will start to earn

[Matt M]

BOTH.

With proper SEO in place it will take time to make your way up the google rankings. In the meantime it does not hurt to use adwords, you really only pay for the clicks that you get and if setup properly its very efficient.

I use adsense personally I do have a adsense $75 credit I will share with all of you at this link: http://www.voltagenewmedia.com/seo/free-...ditcoupon/ not spam, feel free to repost it via my link!

[DJ Student]

My advice would be to target both.

Look at it like this, SEO is an investment for the future and better rankings where you can get hundreds of thousands of clicks for very little money. Now if you look at Adwords, you pay per click, this won't guarantee a sale, all of the message son your site need to be right so to create the right customer journey.

SEO - Long term investment
Adwords - Short term plan

[Ivor]

All advertising takes a lead in time and money. Initially your competition will click your ad, customers may not buy the first, second or even third month. They need time to gain trust and confidence in your site, this can be achieved by adding client testimonials.
SEO is the best long term investment, with Adwords you are only on page one whilst you have money. You need profiles on LinkedIn.com and any professional associations. Be active in related forums and blogs, you can gain keywords from there. Google takes your website trust from all your online accounts. Consider membership of "The Federation of Small Business" for networking.

[Blucheebo]

This is a very similar question to one asked by Laura Allen 3 days ago. Might be worth reading those comments aswell? The link for that thread was:
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/ind...pOGbBxLXaa

[Tony]

SEO is a long term strategy and using it to build a site that ranks well in a competitive field could take years. PPC is a good choice for quickly getting targeted traffic to a site and establishing whether you have a product that is of interest to your target market.

If you have tried PPC for a few weeks and it has not brought you much in sales then you need to look at improving your landing page.

Do you have a landing page designed specifically for your PPC visitors ?
If not, you need one. You should not be sending PPC traffic to your home page ( a frequent mistake ).

Your best option is to set up a PPC campaign to send traffic to a special landing page optimized for those visitors. Then use the traffic to improve your conversion rate by using simple A/B split-testing or Taguchi accelerated split-testing. You can learn more about this at the resource I have provided below.

[Rich]

I would recommend spending on PPC and then using a do-it-yourself SEO tool [LotusJump] to work on the SEO side of things. That way you wont have to spend a ton on an SEO firm which can cost in the $1000s and you can put more towards paid traffic.