Why SEO Matters When SEA Isn’t Applicable
For any business using the online world to promote themselves, search engine optimization – or SEO – has become a popular and commonly used marketing technique. Indeed, for years, people have seen search engine advertising – SEA – solutions like Google AdWords as a viable way to market their business.
From an industry being too niche to make it work to advertising budgets not stretching far enough to take the risk, many businesses fail to utilize such opportunities in the long-term. This is why, for so many, the more organic and openly accessible SEO is, the more likely it is to succeed.
After all, many forms of SEA are rather challenging to work with, especially for newbies. When done wrong, it can be an expensive and damaging failure, one that makes any kind of recovery or redemption impossible. To get around that problem, many choose to turn to SEO as it offers a more user-friendly and reliable option, and when used right, can make a wholesale difference.
What is SEA?
You can advertise on any of the three largest search engines. On Google, there are small blocks of text with a link. The same with Yahoo and Bing.
That is search engine advertising (or SEA). You pay to advertise in these spaces.
Via SEO, you mainly get visitors because your website is found valuable or relevant to a keyword. You get visitors because you pay for those visitors.
How much it costs at Google AdWords (Google Advertising System), Bing, or Yahoo depends on the keywords you want to advertise. Keywords with a lot of competition cost more.
You pay-per-click and decide how many clicks you want to get per day and decide on a budget. Google is much more popular than Yahoo and, therefore, we advise most people to use Google AdWords.
Why SEO (Often) Wins Over SEA
- Some might be reading this and wonder why SEO > SEA is the case in some industries. For one, the demand may not be there to get enough hits and buys using SEA. In short, if there is not a strong consumer culture within that industry it can be very hard to get people to join in and feel a part of it.
- At the same time, SEA is a very expensive failure. It’s more of a trial and error solution, too, so many are put off by the high risk, high reward nature of it. It can be working one week and then hit a snag the next.
- For that reason, SEO tends to come out on top in the most glorious way possible. It works well because it works in any niche when targeted correctly. It’s much easier to get right and much harder to make a mess of. Add in the fact that SEO is much more likely to give you an organic range of stats.
- Keeping that in mind, you should see a huge difference in the way that you work with marketing. SEA works in certain industries and can be lucrative, but can also be expensive and hard to recover from.
- Some say that SEO can have a similarly ruinous effect. From using black hat marketing techniques to old-school keyword stuffing, you can make any errors that you cannot recover from.
- Last but not least, not all companies are allowed to utilize SEA, which automatically lets them focus on SEO as an alternative. Let’s take, for example, cannabis companies. While legalization is on the rise, advertising platforms often shy away from allowing such companies to advertise, not for legal reasons, but because these platforms tend to be somewhat conservative. Also, many alcohol-related companies, healthcare ads, and political agencies are rejected by AdWords.
With SEA, that money spent is not coming back if it does not hit the target. SEO offers a wider scope, more natural appeal, and organic responses, and also the opportunity to see something build that lasts long-term.
Can you see what the most likely option to succeed for you would be?
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