Should You Use Organic or Paid Search for Your Business?

Potential customers use search to find your business, so you want to stand out from the competition. Understanding the difference between organic and paid search is important when coming up with a marketing plan. Both types have benefits, and, done properly, both can lead to excellent results when your customers use a search engine. Which is right for your company?

The Benefits of Organic Search

Organic search has the benefit of being the lowest cost choice. Clicks from organic searches are free. When used properly, you can also count on great conversion rates, since the organic search results should provide the best solution to your customers’ problems.

Organic SEO is a cost-effective way to improve your company’s visibility. Because of the affordability of this type of marketing, you can use organic SEO to share knowledge and information.

Organic results keep your company in front of your potential customers. The results are not dependent on financing a marketing budget or spending money on the PPC model. You can target your content to reach customers in different stages of the buying process without ever spending a dime on paid search.

The Benefits of Paid Search

When it comes to online advertising, paid search is the strategy that brings the fastest results. It takes a while to see results with organic search, but paid search starts providing results as soon as it is implemented.

The placement of paid search ads, directly at the top of the search engine results page, ensures they are the first thing people see when they search your topic. This allows you to rank ahead of your competitors without worrying about optimizing content or, as in the past, coming first in the alphabet.

There are other benefits to paid search. Paid search allows you to expand your business listing, adding phone numbers, multiple site links, and additional items that make your listing easier and more attractive for your customers to use.

There are a variety of paid search options when using online advertising. In addition to the traditional search ads, which list your business at the top of the search engine results page, you can use video ads, shopping ads, and Gmail ads. Paid search makes targeting your customer easy and effective.

Paid Vs Organic Search

Organic search is a long process and requires focused work on building a website that will rank well. Paid search allows you to see results immediately, but does require you to invest in advertising continually to continue to see results.

Many people find that a combination of paid and organic search works best for their business. Using paid search to bring in customers while working on your organic positioning allows you to enjoy the benefits of both. When you use paid search, you get data about your ads, keywords, and how customers respond that you can use to improve your organic search results as well.