When you want to increase traffic to your website, you have two basic options, SEA advertising or search engine optimization (SEO). Marketers often ask themselves the question of which is more effective in the long term and the short term.
Search marketing deserves a multidimensional approach that starts with a solid natural base (SEO)and should, be completed and improved through SEA campaigns to further increase exposure and increase conversions.
Thus, it is more logical to ensure that a website meets the general performance criteria, that it is effective, quickly in order to respect the best guidelines for natural referencing.
Among the best practices, we can find the speed, the number of errors on the website, the presence of a robots.txt file, a sitemap, structured data, to offer a perfect user experience both on desktop and mobile.
Once these criteria are in place, it would then be entirely beneficial to further strengthen sales efforts with a few accompanying SEA campaigns to go beyond the limited natural reach for the brand and/or its website.
But let me explain.
First of all, it is clear that natural referencing generates much more traffic as paid SEA Google AdWords or other campaigns (Yahoo, Bing, etc.). Here is an example of different paid acquisition levers.
This paid traffic likely consists of more qualified visitors who are further down the sales funnel and more likely to convert, but the overwhelming amount of traffic generated by SEO should never be ignored/disdained.
Although advertising helps brands generate traffic and revenue, it is important to consider the volume disparity between natural referencing and paid referencing in terms of traffic.
Additionally, in the case of SEA advertising in particular, it is either the brand’s website or a landing page that will need to be perfectly optimized for conversion.
So creating SEA campaigns also involves significant optimization work. Just like SEO, SEA requires special attention.
Of course, your SEA campaigns will increase your traffic and your conversion, but don’t expect to perform as well as in natural referencing.
If you have not developed your natural referencing and you only rely on SEA campaigns to grow your business, the day you stop will be complicated because you will no longer have any traffic on your site.
SEO vs SEA in 4 points:
The components of search marketing
Search Marketing is search marketing composed of two main levers to develop the visibility of your site, your leads, your sales in general.
These levers being natural referencing and paid referencing.
They work incredibly well togetherbut most of the time, that’s not the reality for small businesses that get eaten up by big brands with more budget.
As large companies can bid more, small businesses must rely first on natural referencing, which is much more accessible.
For situations like this, it makes sense to make intense SEO improvements before moving to a more SEA-focused approach.
Optimize your natural referencing or make SEA advertisements to obtain an immediate impact?
Investing in an SEA advertising campaign should produce a significant ROI, assuming that the advertising meets the needs of the leads and is effective and that the landing pages used are optimized.
However, paid placement in Google alone could be expensive, especially if the other elements on which its success depends are not working properly.
SEA advertising campaigns on Google Adwords for example are not known to be cheap so if there is an error on your site or site your conversion funnel is “pierced”then it’s a very big waste of money.
Paid advertising offers the possibility of obtaining a faster return on investment than if these funds were invested in improving the natural referencing of your brand.
But over time, we also notice that improvements to your natural referencing cost nothing apart from your time and have a lasting and greater effect in terms of volume.
So it can be inferred that SEA advertising campaigns provide an immediate increase in your site’s conversion, but once you stop investing, your growth would also stop.
Should established businesses integrate SEA campaigns?
In this situation, the answer could be completely different.
When a brand stops placing SEA ads, it’s likely they will see the same drop in performance, just like any other website.
But these big brands also typically have specialized internal marketing teams to oversee visibility efforts which generally also include maintaining the website’s content and performance.
Not to mention the fact that many business websites have already built a quality online presence through natural referencing.
In order to improve this visibility, paid referencing is not only logical, but will generate even more improvement only for small businesses.
Natural referencing or SEA campaigns for my business?
If your budget is limited and you must choose between the two levers of search marketing, you will have to take into account several other factors in addition to the inequality in volume between the two practices.
Based on this disproportion alone, it is clear that the enduring power of natural search trumps that of paid search.
However, other factors must be examined:
- The current status of your website.
- The level of natural visibility of your website.
- If you already have or are currently using paid search.
- The goals of your website and brand. (in terms of conversions/leads)
- Where the majority of your site traffic comes from.
- How your brand, product or service fits into a lead’s buying journey.
Like any other digital marketing practice, most of your next steps just depend on your brand, your website, your goals, and the people you hope to convert.
One thing is certain, natural referencing and paid referencing are not adversaries, but complementary.