Anyone who wants to sell something over the internet must first establish their presence. This means that you have to appear before the public, you have to be known and have credibility. There are two ways to do this, either through organic trafficking or through paid trafficking. What are the differences, which is best suited to your business and how should the two relate?
This publication will talk a little about this topic and try to provide some important information.
Differences
Firstly, it is important to understand in depth the difference between these two concepts.
Organic traffic is that which is obtained through search engine algorithms and which presents results based on terms entered by users. With the huge number of thousands of websites that are built every day, competition is very high these days to achieve a good positioning.
To overcome this situation, the only possible way is to understand well how the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) works. Once you understand this part, you need to put your knowledge into practice to optimize your blog, website, or Landing Page, so that search engines can find it, understand its content, and place it in the most prominent places. If, on the one hand, all this has the disadvantage of taking a long time, it has the very positive side of not spending money on the process.
One disadvantage of organic traffic is that no matter how well a blog is optimized, it will always appear below paid ads, meaning it is almost impossible for it to be the first option that appears to the reader. However, it gains a great advantage in the fact that as it is not dependent on financing it can remain well-positioned for longer, thus transmitting a greater sense of trust and credibility.
Paid traffic is that which is presented in a specific section of Google results and which contains advertisements that are paid for by the owners. This investment has the main disadvantage of the money that needs to be invested, however, when used well it can bring very good results and give a lot of profit to the author of the ad.
The big advantage is that you can always be in a privileged position about other results, this means that you have an easier time attracting new customers and promoting the product in a much more effective way. Furthermore, if it is a well-executed campaign, it will likely have enough profits to pay the advertising promotion costs, thus creating a cycle of constant self-financing.
Of course, it is necessary to remember that, to have good results, a campaign must be well done and very appealing, this requires knowledge and time to perfect. It is common for the first paid campaigns to have no financial return and an investment to be necessary, which for some people may be too expensive.
As it was clear, neither system is perfect on its own, so the solution must always involve the integration of both systems into a well-organized strategy to overcome market competition.
Which one is the best?
After concluding the benefit of complementing organic search (Search Engine Optimization – SEO) and paid traffic (Search Engine Advertising – SEA), it is important to talk a little more about the advantages and disadvantages of each method.
The first thing that must be said is that contrary to what many people think, SEO is not completely free! Inevitably there is financial investment in creating content, graphics, or writing, or in maintaining your hosting, or purchasing a template more suitable for your product… there are always costs, now of course they are lower than the SEA.
This is important to mention because it is very common to find “specialized” content on the internet that says the opposite and that conveys the idea that organic trafficking is the result only of the time spent creating a blog.
There is another aspect that is important to define, which is the quality of the results presented and the confidence that readers give to these results.
If you are a mere user and go to Google to search for something, who will you trust more? In those links that appear in the ads section? Or in the first links that appear in the results section?
If you chose the first, then know that this is the preference of more than 60% of Google users.
This choice is justified by the simple fact that anyone can appear in the ads section, as long as they have the money to do so. In Google’s first results, only those sites appear that have been around for a long time, have been seen by thousands of people, and were considered to be reliable, authentic, and important in the information they provide.
This construction of a good SEO ranking is something that has the biggest disadvantage of the time required. It is a method that requires you to place content every day, write quality text, pay attention to keywords, and many other small tricks to improve the performance of your blog or website. This can be the biggest challenge for anyone who wants to gain expression on the internet using this method, that is, the time they are willing to give between starting the blog and seeing real results.
This is the big point in which SEA stands out, is that with the possibility of paying to highlight your blog, the results will be much faster. Another important aspect is that thanks to tools like Google Analytics it is possible to have access to a lot of information about who visits our blog the most, at what time, and in which country and this allows us to adjust our campaign in real-time to reach the maximum number of people and as quickly as possible.
This also represents a great economic advantage, because as we can adapt the advertisement to the audience we want, it allows us to use only the money that is necessary to obtain the best results. In the case of SEO, this audience organization is much more complex as we have no way of directly choosing who we want to see our content.
Another important aspect is the requirement for content quality, that is, as in SEA the content is paid to be shown, but the Google algorithm does not perform a qualitative assessment of it, which means that there is much greater scope for showing any type of content.
Benefits of combining SEO with SEA.
Given this reality, it becomes clear that the best strategy is the relationship between the advantages of SEA and the qualities of SEO.
It is true that at first glance it may seem tempting to base our entire strategy on paid ads, however, according to data from Google itself in 2020, 68% of all traffic on internet pages came from organic search and the remainder 32% came from a combination with paid search.
In this case, the question that arises is how can we combine both strategies.
The best solution is always to create regular, quality content to climb the SEO rankings and simultaneously advertise your blog. A good idea might be to run 3 ads simultaneously, see which one has the best results, find out which content people liked the most, and write more about that content. Then make another 3 announcements to see which Call to Action is the most eye-catching and start integrating it into your posts.
You can do this with all aspects of your blog and this way you always have up-to-date information about what people want most.
At the same time, you can do some research on how to increase your rating within the Google algorithm. In this aspect, issues such as the quality of writing, the description of images, or the existence of external links are extremely important!
What is your strategy to get more views? And how long have you been practicing it? Write in the comments as we will be happy to know.
Ricardo D’almeida
