Marketing and advertising are two very complex things in the digital world, as there are all kinds of ways they can be used to boost your business. Some marketing and advertising techniques have a higher success rate than others, but one thing we encourage is that you are aware of all the different opportunities and ways to market your business. Every business wants to get themselves out there and generate as many leads as possible. Two ways you can do this, and in fact two rather different techniques, are paid search advertising and organic search marketing. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and so we wanted to go into a little more detail so that you are aware of some of the potential ways to boost your business and what each of these entail.
Paid search advertising
Paid search advertising is pretty much as it sounds. It means paying to advertise your business in particular ways online, rather than organically pushing your business out there and increasing things like website traffic naturally. With this being said, paid search advertising of course requires you to invest money into advertising your business, however the cost of this will vary completely depending on the budget you want to set. Not all paid search advertising costs a lot of money, but in fact it can be done on a very low budget. Furthermore, paid search advertising generates results very fast. The more money you invest, the more results you will generate, however you can still get a lot of success out of small campaigns, which is good if you want to test something out.
Organic search marketing
When you search for something online, like a particular term or phrase, the search engine results will show you two things; paid search results, and organic search results. The paid search results will generally be at the very top of the page a little bit separate from the rest, and say ‘ad’ somewhere and stand out visually, whereas the organic search results are the normal ones underneath these. Organic search results come from when a business naturally optimises their website so that it will be found when people search for certain keywords or phrases relating to the business. Search engine algorithms will list websites depending on the relevance of them to the search term used.
The thing that generates the most success in organic search marketing, is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). This is a digital marketing strategy that works to make your website rank higher on search engines. It involves lots of different things, such as optimising the function of the website and user access, the quality of the content, the images, the links throughout the website, and more. For example, if your website was advertising a joinery business based in Manchester, a common search term would be “joiners in Manchester”. SEO will work to get your website appearing higher on search engine results pages so that more people will become aware of your business and therefore you will receive more website traffic and generate more leads.
Paid VS organic search
If you want consistent results, the best way to achieve this is to build it up organically, as this will last and you will continue to generate the leads you need constantly, whereas when you do paid search advertising, although the results come in thick and fast, it doesn’t necessarily last in the long run. However, paid search generates results a lot quicker than organic search marketing, and these are also guaranteed. As well as this, if you find certain types of campaigns work really well for your business and you are reaching your target audience effectively, this will help you to set up similar campaigns in the future as you know what works for your business.
Due to the fast pace of paid search advertising, you are able to see pretty quickly what methods work and which ones don’t, which then allows you to correct these and alter your methods so that they work better and generate results more effectively. The whole trial and error process is a part of any type of marketing, however when you are doing it organically, it may take a considerably longer period of time for you to realise that something doesn’t work and needs to be changed. However, once you figure this out, you can set up a steady and successful organic search marketing plan to keep generating results for your business.
For more information or if you would like to speak to us about digitally advertising your business, simply get in touch with us via our contact page and we will be more than happy to help!
