SEO vs Banner/Text Advertising

Which is better, SEO (marketing) or Advertising? That is a question that I often get from people who are trying to get traffic to their site. It’s a good question.

The answer, you need to do both.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be done for free. You would be crazy not to take advantage of it. Free marketing is great but search engine competition is high so make sure you do your SEO carefully. SEO can also take many months to be indexed by search engines.

2. Advertising isn’t free but it is instant: Unlike SEO Marketing, Web advertising is instant, you message can be put on tens or thousands of sites within 4 hours (our network includes over 80,000 sites) and you can get guaranteed traffic. The increased traffic will also help your sites rating. Remember, Web Sites are also judged by Search Engines according to how much traffic they get.

3. Search Engine Marketing only gets your name in front of people who are searching for it: Lots of people buy things or become interested in things through advertising. If people don’t know about a product, they can’t search for it. That being said, people who click through to your site via a search engine are well qualified customers.

4. SEO is effective but very time consuming: To do SEO properly you need to vigilantly watch your backlinks, manually submit to directories, write and manually submit newsworthy press releases, write and manually submit and write excellent information articles, and meticulously optimize your web pages for keyword density. Advertising takes no time at all and someone else does the work for you.

5. Advertising creates valuable information: When you advertise, you get a report on where people are coming from, that tells you a lot. Everyone thinks they know who their market is, but often they really don’t. In knowing what type of sites your clicks are coming from you will better know who your online customer is. It may not be the type of customer you think you should be marketing to.

6: Advertising helps refine your marketing message: When you purchase text ad advertising you can enter in an unlimited number of text ads all with different text and a different marketing message. You get a report of which ads are being clicked on which will tell you which message is connecting with the public. This information is INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT. Just to get this data is worth the advertising cost alone. It tells you exactly what your customers are looking for. You can use this data to further refine your SEO and to make changes to your site and other advertising messages so they are more effective.

These are just some of the reasons why you need to do both. Any effective marketing strategy is going to include both SEO and web advertising. You simply can’t get it all done one way.

Be sure you have control over how your banner looks and what your ad says. Many ad companies may try to take control over your campaign and dictate how your concept should look. They do know what works and what doesn't but you don't have to agree if you don't want to. Stay firm and maintain control over your own advertising campaign. You know how you want visitors to view your company.