Natural Search or Paid Search?

September 2, 2008

There is a great deal of noise about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) these days and well there should be, if no one can find your site the odds are you’re loosing immediate business and long-term opportunity. There is also an equal amount of discussion about paid search (e.g. Google Adwords) to drive traffic and business. The question faced by many business owners, particularly small to medium sized businesses, is “Which one to focus on?” to which the answer is (as always) “it depends.” Before beginning an online ad campaign or optimizing your site for SEO, there are a few common misconceptions business owners should be aware of:

“Once I optimize my site, I’ll start getting a lot more traffic.” You might, but there are a few dependencies like whether or not anyone is looking for what you are selling to start with, and how crowded your market it. It’s also important to understand that it takes time and traffic may not flood in all of a sudden and, most importantly, optimizing your site is an ongoing effort. It’s not something you do once and are done. If you don’t keep it up, you won’t see the results.
“Paid search will help me sell a lot more.” Again, it depends. How many competitors do you have? How well written are your ads and where do they show up in the search results. If they aren’t on the first page, you’re not getting nearly the effect you want. Like SEO, and even more so, running a paid search campaign is an ongoing effort and it is absolutely a science which demands testing and validation of results then tweaking the formula and ads to improve performance. If you don’t have the time be very careful about diving into an online advertising campaign (consider paying an expert to do it for you). Many a small business has lost a tremendous about of capital running such campaigns without knowing what they were doing. Splashing up ads on Google or Yahoo does not equal certain sales, only certain bills from the search companies.

Along those lines, when you run a paid search campaign or have a site which sells something, conversion rates are still traditionally fairly low. About 3%-8% of visitors to your site actually making a purchase is typical. I’ve had clients disappointed when they didn’t get 90% so expectations had to be reset. A lot of site visitors are just curious, are looking for information or just want to kick the tires.

Now back to Paid Search vs. Natural Search…

Paid search will get you more traffic faster and can be optimal for those selling on-line since you can measure the cost per transaction of running your campaign and adjust accordingly. But paid search isn’t necessarily the best choice for everyone. If you’re running an informational site for your niche business paid search can get very expensive very quickly. Ultimately, there are aspects of SEO (like how you configure your URL’s) which will aid you in natural search as well as paid search so my recommendation to any business is to at least a perform a fundamental SEO review and revision. Ultimately, the combination of SEO for natural search and paid search is going to be your biggest bang for the buck and finding the balance will depend largely on the needs and nature of your business.

When looking for someone to help you with SEO and paid search, look for a company with experience and who will leave you with an on-going plan. You might hire them to execute it for you (which might be a very good idea) but if you are capable of the maintenance and want to maintain it yourself an education should be a part of what you get from those you hire.

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