SEO - AdWords - The Essential SEO Tool

Which is better? AdWords or SEO?

That's a question that has sparked many debates and quite a few furious debates on numerous forums. The debate still rumbles on even now.

As an AdWords specialist myself you would probably expect me to believe that AdWords is better. However that's not actually true and to be honest I don't believe the question itself has any value.

You see I believe both have their place in a well designed and executed web promotion strategy. Both of these approaches have their own strengths and there own weaknesses.

In fact I firmly believe that no business should rely on just one way to grow its business. If you do that, you are also denying your business the extra customers that different strategies can bring and worse you are putting your business at significant risk.

For example, let us assume your business relies on SEO to bring in all of your sales. Where would that business be if your site suddenly dropped out of the search engine results? How long could you survive?

The same is true with AdWords as well. Google has been known to close down accounts if it feels you are breaking their rules. Imagine how much that would hurt if your only means of getting traffic to your website was through AdWords.

However what I really wanted to share with you is my view that AdWords is an excellent tool for SEO. Rather than treating these two approaches as competing techniques, it is far better to view them as complimentary.

To understand the point I'm trying to make you first have to agree with me that the only reason you send traffic to your website is so that you can do business with the people you are sending there. If you are sending lots of people but none are buying then you are wasting your time.

So if you accept this fact then you must also accept that the keywords you should target for your website are the keywords that send buying traffic and not just lots of traffic.

What you need to do therefore is find out which keywords will send buying traffic. The only sure way to find out to do this through testing and this is where AdWords can be invaluable.

Using AdWords you can test lots of keywords very quickly. In a matter of minutes you can send traffic to your site from a variety of keywords and test which ones give you the best sales.

Obviously you need to run these tests for a while so that you can build up enough data to make an educated decision but we are probably only talk a few weeks before you start to get a good idea of the better keywords to target. You don't have this advantage of speed with SEO. It could take months to get your pages to rank sufficiently high enough for a few keywords to generate enough traffic for you to be able to gather the amount of data to decide if they create good sales.

So my advice is you should generally always start by using AdWords to research your keywords so that you can then be sure that any SEO you then do will be using the right keywords. I would also suggest that you should continue with AdWords even after you have your keywords in place using SEO because this gives you two chances of getting the click and it also protects you business if one of these two processes suddenly stops working.

Source: Ezine

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