AdWords versus SEO

Had an email from a new AdWords client today asking why he is not showing up in the natural search results for Google when his competitor is and it raised the issue of why anyone would want to pay for AdWords.

The reason is simple: it is faster than SEO (you get traffic in 15 minutes) and if you look into the time costs, it can be cheaper. You can also optimize your AdWords account for thousands of different phrases whereas SEO tends to focus on a few very popular phrases.

My client is now getting targeted traffic for a few cents a time (I've reduced his click costs to 34% of the original costs by taking some early optimization steps) but, yes, it would be ideal for him if he ranked in first position for natural search and there are some steps we can take to move him up the rankings.

The first thing to do is to find out which keywords generate the sales orders. Then we will look into optimizing for those keywords by seeing what the current first ranking site is doing and trying to beat it: SEO is not about beating the search engines, it's about beating your competitors. This last point is often overlooked.