Driving traffic for your business: Is SEO and Google Ads the Same?

Understanding SEO 

Let’s start with a brief explanation of what SEO is. SEO refers to the strategies and best practices you follow to ensure your website ranks as well as possible in the SERPs (search engine results pages). 

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If you want to drive traffic to your website, you really need to appear in positions 1-5 for your chosen keywords. Stats show that the number one result on Google has an average CTR (click through rate) of 27.6% and this number drops as the position in the SERPs drops so appearing at the top is going to drive the most traffic to your website. 

When ranking your website and deciding where it should appear, Google takes the following factors into consideration: 

• Keywords used and relevancy to your business 
• The quality of your content 
• The user experience of your website 
• The mobile friendliness of your website 
• Page speed 

Optimising your website for these three elements is essential for a successful SEO strategy. 

Key benefits of SEO 

SEO offers a huge range of benefits for your business with the key ones being increasing the visibility of your website and making sure that your potential customers find you when they’re searching for your products or services online.  

If you can drive more traffic to your website and you offer the information visitors need and a great user experience, you’re more likely to convert them into customers, making SEO a great way to start growing your business. 

Other benefits include: 

• A cost-effective way to drive leads 
• A long-term strategy for driving traffic and elads for your business 
• Increased brand awareness 
• Puts you ahead of your competition 
• Levels the playing field with bigger businesses 
• Helps to build trust with your potential customers

Let’s move onto Google Ads…

Understanding Google Ads

Google Ads is a pay-per-click (PPC) platform and is one of the most popular. When you run Google Ads, you pay for your ad to be shown to or clicked on by searchers. These ads appear at the top of the search results and are a great way to ensure your business is found by potential customers. 

When you run Google Ads, you bid on specific keywords related to your business, choose your target audience, location and time of day for your ads and Google charges you when someone clicks through to your website. 

There are numerous types of PPC ads including: 

• Search Ads: these are the text ads that appear at the top of the search results and look similar to organic search results. 

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• Google Shopping Ads - these are the image ads that appear at the top of the search results when you’re looking to buy something 

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• Display Ads - these appear in a visual format across a range of websites and devices. They are shown within content users are viewing such as on news sites and are great for brand awareness. 

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• Video Ads - these ads are shown on YouTube and are available in a number of formats. 

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For more information about the types of Google Ads, take a look at our blog: 9 types of Google Ads explained. 

Key benefits of Google Ads 

Just like SEO, Google Ads offer a huge number of benefits for your business. Unlike SEO which takes time to build results, Google Ads offers immediate visibility. 

SEO, on the other hand, takes more work and is a longer-term strategy but it will continue to drive results for years to come. 

Google Ads offer other benefits including:

• Reach a highly targeted audience
• Easily monitored and measured 
• Budget changes can be made easily 

We know exactly what SEO and Google Ads are but how do they compare to each other? 

SEO and Google Ads: A comparison 

Both SEO and Google Ads are great strategies for driving traffic to your website and increasing leads or sales for your business. 

However, while they both offer these benefits, they’re also very different strategies. Let’s take a look at how the two compare. 

Time to see results 

As soon as you turn Google Ads on, you’ll start to see results. As long as you have your ads, targeting and landing pages right, the minute you start spending money, you’ll start to see traffic coming to your website. However, as soon as you turn the ads off, this traffic stops. 

On the other hand, if you run an SEO strategy, it will take time to start seeing results. If you’re starting from scratch, it can take anywhere between 3-12 months to start driving significant levels of traffic to your website, depending on the competition in your market. 

The difference between SEO and Google Ads is that SEO will continue to repay your investment over the long term whereas Google Ads stops driving results the minute you stop spending money. 

Control and Targeting 

Google Ads offers you extremely precise targeting options. You can target your ideal audience by: 

• Location 
• Interests 
• Demographics 
• Life events
• Time of day 

You can really drill down to ensure that your ads are being shown to the right people in the right places at the right time. 

SEO doesn’t offer the same targeting options. You will need to ensure that you choose the keywords that your audience is likely to be using when looking for your products or services online. You might not be able to choose the age of these people or their interests but, by creating high-quality and relevant content, you can target the people who need your business.

Costs 

When you invest in SEO, you’ll need to invest over time to see the best results. This investment pays off over time. Once you have reached the top results in the SERPs, you’ll just need to do maintenance work to stay there. You will continue to drive traffic long after your investment has paid for itself. 

For Google Ads, you’ll need a monthly budget that aligns with the results you expect to see. If you’re in a highly competitive market, you can expect to need a significant budget to help you get the most from your campaigns. 

Visibility 

SEO allows your website to appear in the organic search results on search engines such as Google or Bing. With this strategy, you will only appear in the search results. 

On the other hand, Google Ads not only allows you to appear in the search results, but depending on the type of ads you run, your ads will also appear on other Google owned sites or third-party websites. 

How can SEO and Google Ads work together? 

While many marketers and business owners think they should use one or the other, SEO and Google Ads can actually be used together to drive even better results and provide your business with a comprehensive online strategy. 

For example, while you work on your SEO strategy and climbing to the top of the search results organically, Google Ads can work on driving traffic to your site until you get there. 

Using both strategies together can double your visibility online and double the amount of traffic being driven to your website. Plus, the data you gather from Google Ads about the people who are engaging with your ads and the keywords that perform the best can help to inform your SEO strategy, and vice versa. 

If you can appear at the top of the search results in both the organic results and the paid results, your brand is going to take up more ‘real estate’ in the search engines and significantly increase the chances of visitors coming to your website. 

Key takeaways 

While SEO and Google Ads have different strategies and different time scales for driving results, the ultimate aim is the same: to help your brand dominate in the search results and traffic drive to your website with the goal of converting these visitors into paying customers. 

When used together, they form an extremely effective online marketing strategy that helps to boost awareness and sales for your business. So, the achieve the best results in digital marketing for your business, consider a balanced approach that combines SEO and Google Ads. 

Both strategies will inform the other to ensure that you’re driving the most relevant traffic to your website and delivering the best results. 

Assessing your current digital marketing strategy and whether your SEO and Google Ads campaigns are optimised and working together will help you to understand where there are gaps in your strategy and where you could be driving even better results. 

If you’d like to know more about how either SEO or Google Ads could help you to grow your business, request a free digital marketing audit from our team.

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