Google Ads VS Organic Traffic

As a business, your aim with your marketing strategy is to get as many people who might want to buy your products and/or services to visit your website as possible.

There are two main routes to getting visitors to your website. One is pay per click (PPC) advertising of which Google Ads is the biggest out there. In fact, Google Ads (formerly known as Adwords until it rebranded in 2018) is so big the name is now synonymous with PPC. The other is organic traffic which is when visitors arrive at your website from unpaid sources and when you have invested in good search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy.

How Does Google Ads Work?

First of all, you identify the keyword or keywords that represent your business. This is what your ideal customer would be putting in the search bar when they are looking for a product or service on Google (or a different search engine PPC service).

Then you can bid on that keyword, telling Google Ads what your budget is, and choosing if you will pay either each time someone clicks on your ad, per 1000 ads or per engagement i.e when someone does something specific on your site like joins your mailing list.

Google Ads then gives you an ad rank, based on your options and your bid amount AND the quality of your website this ad rank will determine how close you get to the top of the search engine results page (SERP).

The higher you are on the SERP for the keyword or words that best represent your business can affect the traffic to your website an enormous amount: over a quarter of people click on the top result on their results page and over 90% of people will click on a result from the first page.

How Do I Increase Organic Traffic?

To get your business closer to the top of the search engine results pages without paying for ads and to direct traffic to your site from other means there are a few options.

• Ensure your website is full of quality content.
• Use a mixture of long and short tail keywords in your content.
• Guest post on others’ blogs.
• Improve your domain authority.
• Include social media marketing in your strategy.
• Invest in professional SEO.

Which is Better Google Ads or Organic Traffic?

Some businesses choose to invest in PPC advertising, others opt for SEO and social media marketing to increase their organic traffic. Many choose a mixture of both. To help you decide which route you will take see some of the main negative and positive points of each option below.

Google Ads Pros

• You will get fast results.
• You can set your budget so you don’t overspend.
• It’s easy.

Google Ads Cons

• Although two-thirds of people will click on paid ads, buying a paid ad does not show your expertise or build trust with your customer.
• It costs money.

Organic Traffic Pros

• Good long term strategy. Even if you are paying for SEO and/or content the effects will last a long time, especially if you are ensuring your content is evergreen.
• Cost-effective option, it can even be free if you are writing your content yourself.
• Builds trust with your customers – you earn their visit to your site rather than pay for it. This makes your business more credible in your customers’ eyes.

Organic Traffic Cons

• Can be difficult to monitor the success of your strategy.
• Takes a long time.
• If the strategy is wrong it might not work.

Approved Business Can Help

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