Organic search is becoming less important than paid search.
Consider the typical sales funnel:
awareness > research > consideration > decision
- Search works best in the research phase, it’s not good at awareness
SEO advantages
- No incremental cost to traffic
- People click on them more
- Once you reach ranking you don’t have to do much to maintain it
SEO disadvantages
- Less control over timing & landing page experience
- Can be difficult to rank for a broad range of categories
Content is what ultimately matters in SEO, but if you are perceived not to have authority, great content won’t matter much
- Content is crawl able so search engines like it
- Internal linking reinforces what’s important on a site
- To rank for a certain search term, it is best to have a single page focused on this topic
- Title tag, heading, URL, etc. helps Google determine if the page is relevant to a search query. This is basic and should be done well. Keyword metatag doesn’t matter- Google doesn’t look at it so don’t bother. The description tag is often times used as the accompanying description text to each search result
About authority
- Search engines use external links and mentions as the primary measure of a site’s authority
- Links from other authoritative sites matter most
- Social buzz counts for a lot too
Search advertising advantages
- More control
- Immediate results
- Ability to test
Search advertising disadvantages
- Incremental cost of traffic- in the long run, traffic costs more than SEO
- Ongoing effort
Improvement cycle
Add keywords & ads > test & optimize > measure results > repeat