Many online marketers continue to divide their efforts between Google’s contextual web-based advertising platform AdWords, which promises fast results but, like any form of advertising, costs money, and organic SEO marketing. Search engine marketing focuses on page and content optimization and generally costs less than ongoing Adwords advertising, although it generally takes longer before showing results. That said, both AdWords and organic SEO marketing have come a long way since their early days. Both options have reached a point where they can complement and even inform each other. Even if you are among those committed to organic SEO marketing and prefer it to direct advertising, Google’s AdWords can still be of use to you. Here’s how.
Using AdWords As a Powerful Research Tool
AdWords can be an effective tool for finding and testing keyword phrases that you can then use as the cornerstone for your organic search engine marketing strategy. Easy to set up and customize, the AdWords advertising platform can help you get an engaging ad campaign up and running in a matter of hours. The platform provides extensive reporting and research tools that can help you discover how effective your keywords are. Whether you want to promote an established website or a startup, with AdWords you can test your essential keywords phrases in a matter of days or weeks, instead of having to wait for the results of your organic SEO marketing, which can easily take anywhere from 3 to 6 months.
The Keyword Tool
AdWords’ Keyword Tool enables you to research the keywords that interest your audience, showing you how many people search for them every month and how tough the competition for them is. While there are more sophisticated and intuitive tools on the web that do the same thing, the Keyword Tool is free to use and convenient, and can help you get started with your Search Engine Optimization efforts. That said, the data the Keyword Tool provides is not sufficient for you to identify those essential keywords you should be using, especially if your market is highly competitive. This is why it’s important to proceed with a paid AdWords campaign.
Why Investing in AdWords Is Worth It
AdWords costs money and requires an investment in time as well, but it enables you to measure the performance of your ads through extensive reports. Going a step further, it puts at your disposal demographic information about the clickers (your prospective customers), including age, gender, and location, which you can then use to fine-tune your keywords. An AdWords campaign, even if run for a very short time, enables you to better understand your visitors. It helps you steer your organic SEO marketing strategy. In addition by testing different landing pages and analyzing the results, it will help you create a more engaging website and a better user experience, that is likely to increase conversion rates.
With AdWords you can effortlessly monitor click-through rates, or how often your ads get clicked. This, together with the conversion rate, or the number of visitors who buy your products or services, sign up for your newsletter, or perform some other profitable action on your site, offer empowering data that you can use to improve your SEO marketing strategy and make it more effective.
AdWords + Organic SEO Marketing = Win
In the end, remember that fusing organic SEO marketing with AdWords is more effective than using only one of these online marketing approaches. Moreover, AdWords is, beyond its advertising capabilities, an excellent tool that, for a relatively low investment, can provide you with extremely valuable data about your audience, which you can then use to engage in highly targeted marketing.