5 situations where Google Ads might be better to use than SEO
The best place to promote your business is pretty much always going to be Google.
And if you read our last article, you’ll know that SEO is usually a much better investment than Google Ads.
However, if we’re being honest, there are situations where your best choice is going to be Google Ads over SEO.
At least in the beginning.
In this article, we’re going to cover 5 of the biggest situations where PPC would be a better investment.
1. Your site is brand new and you need immediate results.
Sometimes, you won’t have the time to campaign for exposure to your business.
And from a client perspective, sometimes you won’t have time to scroll through Google’s search results, either.
For example, if you need emergency services…
Are you going to scroll through search results pages looking for the best business…
Or are you going to call the first one you see?
For situations like this, running a Google Ads campaign might be best.
How long does it take for SEO to take effect?
This is gonna depend on everything from the business you’re in to the amount of work you’re planning to do.
No matter what the situation though, one thing’s for sure:
It will take months of consistent effort before you start seeing the benefits of an SEO campaign.
Sometimes it can even take over a year!
Despite the long range of benefits an SEO campaign can provide, that is the one disadvantage it can have.
With a PPC campaign, you can start benefiting right away.
When you sign up for Google Ads, your page will start showing up the moment you start running them.
No need to wait for months of Keyword Research, Onpage work, and link building to take effect – you can be the first result people see right away.
While the average click through rate is absolutely NOWHERE near what the first organic search result tends to be (The average is 1.91% for search ads and 0.35% for display ads according to Wordstream), you’ll still get enough exposure to see more leads.
2. You don’t know the conversion rate of your website
What’s the most important part of your website?
This can be a debatable subject depending on who you ask.
But if you’re using your website to get more customers, the thing you want to focus on the most is going to be the conversion rate.
The conversion rate tells you what percentage of the people visiting your website are taking the action you’re trying to get them to take.
In most cases, this is going to involve people contacting you for your services.
What does conversion rate have to do with PPC and SEO?
You want to know your conversion rate because you want to make sure you’re getting the most out of your campaign.
The average conversion rate for a website is 5%.
If your number is something below that, you might want to work on increasing it.
How can PPC Ads help me learn my conversion rate?
You won’t know your true conversion rate until you have enough data.
If you don’t already have a lot of traffic to your website, you might not know for a long time.
Google Ads will provide you with a quick solution for this by driving traffic to your website immediately.
Knowing your conversion rate gives you an idea of how much you can expect to make from the traffic that comes to your website.
From there, you can optimize the rate better and get better expectations of how much business you’ll see from the traffic you’re going to get.
Once you have a conversion rate that can give you a positive ROI with Google Ads, you can REALLY reap the full benefits of ranking organically.
3. The search volume for your niche is too low for an SEO campaign.
The search volume of the keywords you’re trying to target can play a big role in the amount of traffic and ultimately the amount of new potential customers that could be coming your way.
However, if the traffic is well under 1000 searches per month (we’re thinking about 200-300), you might be better off just settling for Google Ads.
Why?
Because in order for SEO to be truly worth the investment, the return has to be there.
If you’re already targeting most of the people in your niche, you probably won’t see a big enough spike in traffic to justify months of campaigning.
In a situation like this, you’re better off running a PPC campaign as opposed to waiting for SEO to kick in.
4. The service you’re trying to sell competes with a lot of unrelated or non-commercial keywords.
This is kind of a unique situation, but one that happens nonetheless.
Let’s say you have a restaurant you’re trying to boost rankings for.
Pretty straight forward, right?
Now let’s say you have a fine dining restaurant that involves eating in pitch black darkness to give people an idea of what it’s like to be blind, with the staff being exclusively blind.
What keywords would you target? And how would you make it clear to people making a first glance at the search results what you’re trying to offer?
Not only would it be hard to rank for the right keywords, but it would also be hard to rank for what you’re trying to specify in exactly.
While promoting will pose a challenge no matter what, PPC will most likely do a lot better than campaigning for months on end to rank for two very different keywords.
5. You’re selling a product online that’s low-price, high-volume
This situation is particularly common with e-commerce stores.
If someone is looking for something like office supplies, a name brand product, or anything else that’s sold in high volume and not a specialized product, they’re usually going to go for the first result they see.
They don’t care that much about if the first result they see is only there because it’s a paid ad.
So it’s important to make sure the first page they see is yours.
Should I still do SEO on my website?
The short answer to this is always going to be yes.
Even if you don’t have the time to run a full SEO campaign (in which case you should be hiring SEO services)…
If you’re not at least making it search-engine friendly…
You’re setting yourself up for failure.
The first page makes up for over 99% of the internet’s traffic…
And out of that 99%, only 5% of them will be expected to click on your Paid Ad.
Organic search results will pretty much always bring you more business than a paid ad… so you want to make sure you’re in a position to get it.
In fact…
You should be using both SEO and Google Ads together to promote your business.
Even if you rank higher than everyone else on Google for your business, running Google Ads will still bring additional customers to your website.
What most people don’t understand about promoting a business be it SEO, Google Ads, Social Media advertising, etc…
Is that every form of advertising is essentially another channel to get clients from.
And the more channels you have for your business, the better.
In conclusion:
SEO can bring you a bigger return on your investment than Google Ads, but you might be better off focusing on Google Ads if:
- You need immediate results
- You don’t know how well your site converts
- Your niche doesn’t get enough searches per month
- Your service competes with a lot of unrelated keywords
- You’re selling products online that are low-price, high volume
Thank you for taking the time to read our blog post.
If you’re not in a situation where you might be better off using Google Ads, and you would like to reap the benefits of SEO, click here to contact us and get started.
Until then, good luck with your business!