SEO vs Google Ads: which delivers longer-lasting results?

Although both appear in Google's search results, there are still differences between SEO and Google Ads and they work in completely different ways. So in this article, MONA Media will we compare SEO and Google Adwords to give you a clearer overview and help you choose the advertising and marketing approach that fits your business.

What are SEO and Google Adwords?

Before deciding between SEO and Google Adwords, make sure you understand a few concepts that set the two apart:

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) means optimizing for search, or optimizing a website for Google. It is about how to make it more likely that users find a website through Google. Put simply, SEO is a set of methods and techniques for raising a website's position in Google's results list. Good SEO lets users see the website's information easily at the top of Google's search results.

What are the benefits of SEO?

• The cost of an Marketing Online campaign is fairly low.
• The website is promoted to the right audience potential customers.
• It reaches a large number of users quickly.
• Most customers already trust Google, which means they also trust the websites Google ranks.
• It is not suitable for seasonal advertising, because keywords will take about 1 to 3 monthsto show up on Google, and sometimes even longer 6 months.

What is Google Adwords?

Google Adwords services are a form of advertising where you pay to increase impressions (CPM) or clicks (CPC). Once setup is done, your ad appears when users search related phrases, but the advertiser only pays when a user clicks the ad or visits the website.

What benefits does Google Ads offer?

• Ads can be launched quickly and stopped at any time.
• Advertisers can limit where their ads appear geographically.
• You only pay when a customer clicks the ad or visits the website.
• You can set your ad budget flexibly by day or by month.
• Each search keyword is matched with your business's own ad message.
• You can change and customize ad messages quickly.

SEO vs. Google AdWords

Many businesses are still unsure whether to invest in SEO or run Google Ads to find customers. Google Ads can bring leads right away, while SEO is a sustainable strategy that attracts customers for free over the long term. Watch this video to see why SEO may be the better choice for your business.

To compare Google Ads and SEO, MONA goes through the criteria below:

Cost of traffic and ability to measure results

Comparing SEO and Google Ads on traffic and measurement. With SEO, traffic is free but measuring results is fairly hard. With Google Adwords you pay for traffic, which also means measuring ad performance is easier.

Time to reach the top

Comparing SEO and Google PPC advertising on the time it takes to appear at the top for a keyword. The nature of Adwords is that, whatever your website's quality, as soon as you pay it appears on Google. Ads show up quickly, but when the money runs out your website stops showing immediately.

SEO is the opposite. It takes a process of at least 3 to 6 months for a website to reach the top. If you stop doing SEO, the site does not vanish at once. It may slip gradually if a stronger competitor pushes you down. But if the SEO was done well, your website can still hold its top position even after you stop.

Number of focus keywords

Comparing SEO and Google Adwords on the number of focus keywords. With SEO, you grow gradually and focus on one set of keywords first, then expand. With Google Adwords you can run many Google Ads keywords or topics at the same time within a single campaign.

Risk

Comparing SEO and Ads on risk during execution. Google Adwords clicks are easy for competitors to abuse, with fake accounts, click fraud or click tools, which drains your budget quickly without real results. With SEO, you are not limited by the number of clicks, and credibility is higher.

Plenty of people focus only on SEO, pull in traffic and forget CRO, the part that decides whether visitors buy. In this video, Huy shares the tools for seeing how customers actually behave on your website. Watch it to optimize your revenue.

Overview of the pros and cons of Google Adwords

To give you an overview of SEO versus Google Ads, MONA has listed the pros and cons of each below:

Advantages of Google Adwords

Fast results

Comparing the differences between SEO and Google Adwords, with running Adwords ads, you only need to build a campaign and top up your Google ads account. After that, your website or message gets priority placement in front of thousands of potential customers.

Google now also uses machine learningto help advertisers monitor and control their spending reports. This helps them learn how to cut costs while improving the conversion rate to win more customers.

Build brand awareness

According to the latest research from Google & Ipsos MediaCT search ads not only increase conversions but also raise brand recognition among customers.

Put simply, even if users and customers do not click the ads, they can still see and remember a business's brand.

Remarketing to people who have visited your website

Comparing SEO and Google Ads on remarketing , Google Adwords lets you market again to people who have visited your website before. For example, a user visits your website and views an item, but is not ready to buy and is only browsing.

Some time later, when they actually want to buy and search on Google again, you can show an ad with personalized content aimed at that visitor through a remarketing ad. That raises your chances of making a sale.

Easy to measure ad performance

Google has built an extremely detailed system for measuring, controlling and optimizing ads. You can see whether each click from an ad brings revenue, which keywords or ad formats perform best, and more.

-> Read more: What is digital marketing? What you need to know

Disadvantages of Google Adwords

Complex and demands high expertise

Google Adwords campaigns are relatively easy to set up and can get good results with a little basic knowledge. But to compete and raise quality, you need a high level of expertise.

The number of ads shown in Google's search results is limited, while competition is intense in almost every industry. Google Adwords' measuring, reporting and optimization system is also very detailed, which makes it fairly complex. Users have to understand and combine hundreds of different metrics to optimize their ads.

Very high competition

As mentioned, the Google Adwords market is fiercely competitive in almost every industry. Businesses large and small usually start online advertising with Facebook Ads and Google Adwords.

Companies are willing to spend a lot to win key keywords or the best positions. To do that, they need a suitable strategy, enough resources and enough time. Otherwise, a business is likely to lose in this competition.

Over the long term, Google Ads generally costs a lot

To hold a position on Google, companies must keep paying for ads. If their card runs out of funds or they stop advertising, the ad no longer appears, and your competitors take all the potential customers.

Limits from Google's policies

Today, Google advertising policies has banned or restricted some categories such as liquor, tobacco, beer and 18+ products. This is a disadvantage for anyone doing business in these fields.

Overview of the pros and cons of SEO

Advantages of SEO

(Almost) free

When comparing SEO and Google Adwords, results delivered through SEO web that reach users and get clicked cost nothing. This is why most websites around the world take SEO seriously. The only cost is hiring an agency to run SEO projects that raise your website's ranking.

Reach more potential customers

With Google Adwords you can only focus on the set of keywords that produces the most conversions, to protect your return on ad spend. That set of keywords represents only about 2-5% of customers who have a need, while 95- 98% of potential customers may be overlooked.

With SEO, you reach more potential customers because the traffic it brings is quite stable. The long-term cost of SEO projects is also considered much lower than Google Adwords.

SEO traffic converts better

In practice, users who reach a website through organic search results (SEO) feel more trust than they do toward ads. As a result, the conversion rate conversion rate from SEO is also higher than other channels.

SEO investment delivers lasting results

Starting Google Adwords is fairly easy and results come fast, so competition is huge. But when you stop paying for ads, your website or ad post almost completely disappears from customers' view.

SEO, on the other hand, is not easy to reach the top with, and not easy to fall from. To rank, you need a technically sound website that is optimized for users. You also have to build plenty of content and wait long enough for Google to judge the site's credibility.

That is why the results from SEO last longer. Even if you do nothing more, your website can hold a stable ranking for 3 to 6 months.

In today's technology era, SEO is extremely important. So how can a business run the most complete SEO campaign? The answer is to work with a company that SEO services .

MONA Media is confident in being a reputable SEO provider, one of the leading SEO service providers today, with a team of SEO specialists tmore than 10 years of experience, a deep understanding of the market and up-to-date knowledge of new SEO trends. See MONA's SEO services below:

Disadvantages of SEO

Takes time to reach a good ranking

SEO takes a lot of effort and time. Typically, SEO projects need 6 to 12 months to deliver their best results.

Google's algorithms change

The standout advantages of SEO have led many people to look for ways to get their ads to the top as fast as possible. As a result, Google's search results are no longer guaranteed to be good quality.

To deal with this, Google keeps updating its algorithms to remove search results that are no longer useful, by dropping their rankings or removing them from search results permanently.

-> Read more: Top 8 most common Google algorithms today

So should you choose SEO or Google Adwords? Should you use both?

You do not have to choose between SEO and Adwords. You can combine the two so they support each other and give the best business results.

SEO is work that needs long-term commitment and continuous upkeep, and is used in businesses' long-range strategies. So if a business needs to run an urgent promotion, it should combine Adwords ads for the short-term plan. But if the budget is limited and you have to pick one, base the decision on your current strategic goal.

Some people think that if you get traffic from SEO you no longer need Adwords. That is wrong. Even if you hold a good top position, you still need Adwords to reach more customers for the same keyword. You can measure the performance of your Adwords campaigns and, if they are profitable, raise the campaign budget. What you need to do is watch Adwords closely to see how well it performs and raise or cut spending accordingly.

So, depending on what each marketing campaign needs, you can choose between SEO and Google Adwords.

-> Read more: What is Googlebot? Everything you need to know about Googlebot

SEO and Google Adwords: Should a new website use them?

Many website owners ask this question. A lot of people think a new website should use Adwords, because it is too new, not yet "mature" enough for Google to evaluate, so SEO does little, and they wait 3 months before starting SEO. This is something to be careful about. There are some issues:

• In most cases, after company website design is finished, businesses do not invest in SEO right away. The website is then not built to SEO standards, the articles are low quality and not optimized, and Google rates the website poorly.
• When you finally decide to do SEO, it takes a lot of effort to fix the old mistakes and wait for Google to update its information, which takes a long time.

So our advice for new websites is to do SEO at some level so that content and information are optimized from the start. This gets keywords to the top much faster, and then you can run Adwords to bring the website its first traffic.

How do you get results from SEO and Google Adwords?

Many people have made the mistake of using the home page link to run Adwords ads, or of choosing generic keywords for SEO.

The reality is that Google users may click link website but not all of them contact you. After SEO techniques and ads bring in traffic, what is left is to run a suitable marketing strategy that leads customers to the final conversion.

-> You may also want to read: 25+ common technical SEO errors and how to fix them

For the best marketing results, should you choose SEO or Google Adwords?

The answer to the question above is to use both, since both are very good for marketing. Adwords has the edge at the start because it brings traffic immediately. But alongside that, you also need to build SEO, because SEO is a long-term strategy that delivers lasting results.

We hope this MONA Media that have comparison of SEO and Google Adwords gives you a broad view of the two approaches. The best choice is to combine both sensibly in your marketing strategy for the strongest marketing results. We wish you success.

-> Learn more: Google Ads and Facebook Ads: which should your business choose?

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• Email: info@themona.global
• Address: 1073/23 Cach Mang Thang Tam, Tan Son Nhat Ward, Ho Chi Minh City