Should your business use SEO or Google Ads or just take the red pill and use both? Did you get our Matrix hat tip there?

Comparing SEO or Google Ads, previously known as Adwords, is like comparing apples to oranges - both are equally and incredibly important, and help to get your brand in front of prospective customers.

What is SEO and Ads?

SEO works to get your site higher in the organic rankings so that you rank for customers typing queries to your content. With traditional marketing channels like print, radio, billboards, and TV you aim to reach a certain target market, but no matter how much research you do, you can never be sure. SEO allows you to target very specific customers by optimizing your website to appear in very specific search queries to very specific demographics, in very specific locations.

Ads allow you to target particular keyword phrases and then create an ad that promotes your site and content for those using those keywords. One of the biggest advantages of Google Ads is the platform’s enormous reach. A monopoly within the market, Google holds 90% of the search market and processes over 3.5 billion searches a day! What business wouldn't want a piece of that action- that's a lot of potential customers!

Both of these channels can help enhance your overall visibility in Search, but it is important to remember that trying to determine which is best you really just can't compare either one over the other.

In a nutshell, a strong and lasting digital presence requires brands to use both channels and craft a strategy that can employ the two together to maximize the online potential of the brand.

What's the different roles of SEO and Google Ads?

SEO and Ads have unique but complementary roles. The discipline of SEO management revolves around making your site appealing for customers as well as creating content that addresses their needs and engages them. This not only involves the material you write or the videos you create, it also involves optimizing site layout and design to ensure that it is user-friendly, easy to navigate, and moving users through your site in a logical way.

Google Ads on the other hand, are a form of online display advertising. It allows you to pay each time a person clicks on an ad you create. Your ad is displayed to users who type in particular keywords on the search engines. This allows you to target users interested in particular topics. Google Ads, therefore, can help you gain the visibility you want for important keywords, even before you have the site reputation and SEO rankings needed to see results from your organic efforts. When you combine both SEO and SEM to maximize that SERP real estate you'll get that top spot every business craves.

So, does Google Ads help with SEO?

When used properly, SEO and Google Ads can work extremely together. Brands that accurately track their rankings and organic traffic can strategically use Ads to increase visibility for important keywords, and drive paid traffic where they do not have the organic ranking to help get them on Page 1.

Google Ads can also be used to test consumer response to particular keywords. If a user’s search keywords match the keywords on your site, your site will show up in the search results.

Brands can create ads for keywords that they are considering optimizing for. They can then track the customers who click on the ad and see how well they respond to the landing page and the rest of the site. Keywords that bring in visitors with higher conversion rates and more engagement will then take a higher priority to those that do not see as much success.

The keyword data from your SEO efforts can also be used to find the right opportunities for Ads. Uncovering keywords that have high search rates, but that also have high competition -- meaning that it will be difficult for a site to earn a slot on the front page of the SERP -- will likely be good candidates for Ads campaigns.

As a brand builds a digital strategy, understanding the different roles of Google Ads and SEO in building a web presence is critical to success.

Keep in mind….

While Google Ads can immediately generate traffic to your website it is not wise to focus solely on a paid marketing method without bolstering your earned and owned media. This is where Search Engine Optimisation comes in.

The better a business can use these two different features together for their advantage, the better their potential results will be in search engines!

Keep in mind though, that in order to optimize both SEO and Google Ads you need to structure your approach, conduct thorough analyses of the results, and keep tweaking your approach. Unless you're a guru in these areas already, don't risk wasting precious time and money trying to do this yourself. Instead hire a marketing agency to make sure your business gets the results it wants.

Our team of professionals at ModFXMedia take tremendous pride in delivering an integrated array of marketing services to deliver bottom-line results that will help to skyrocket your business.

If you have any questions about SEO and google ads and you'd like us to help set up a plan for your business, let us know - we’d love to hear from you!