Organic VS Paid Advertising: Website Marketing

As the digital marketing world is continuing for many businesses there becomes a definitive search between how a business at various stages should continue in marketing their platforms, such as their website. Paid and organic marketing can come in different options. Most commonly marketing a website through search engines. There are pros and cons to paying for website marketing or allowing the website to market itself. Paid marketing can come in the form of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) to build website traffic.

Benefits of paid advertising

One of the major benefits of paid marketing is the time it takes to receive results is generally pretty quickly. Versus organic marketing will build overtime as well as even building credibility to the website. Credibility becomes more and more important for consumers in building brand awareness from a constant view of the search results. While it takes patience to have organic marketing for a website they can still produce the same results as paid marketing. This generally means the continent is marketed to or attracted to its relevant users or consumers who show interest in that company.

How does organic marketing differ?

However, organic marketing, it does require that there be a strategy for building the website as well as optimizing content. As time passes it is important to continue to invest time in building the website for the website to continue to grow as well as building traffic, rankings, leads, and even revenue. According to WebFX, they have found that the return on investment organic search has yielded 43% of a year over year traffic in Greece and even a 71% year-over-year organic contact form submission from its consumers (WebFX, n.d.).

Although organic marketing can provide the best budget saver, it requires the business to be patient as the results grow over extended time periods. This could mean that they don’t see results until the end of the first six months. For smaller businesses, organic search and the time involved from research to optimizing the website can be relatively harder for one department or person handling all of the marketing, for a business to achieve the best results from organic marketing (Fishkin, 2017).

Although, organic marketing provides a business owner a quick turn around time from the creation of the ad in comparison to the time and process it takes to achieve the organic search results. This is due to the opportunities provided such as information from location, age, and keywords (WebFX, n.d.). These tactics allow a business to target directly TO its consumers rather than FROM the consumer searching for that business/product (from SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

Cons to paid marketing

While it’s a great strategy in paid marketing directly, There is one major con to paid marketing, through its the paper click function versus free advertisement in users clicking simply on the website from the organic search results. This could begin to be a long term cost that could have been saved in the marketing budget and used in other options like organic marketing.

Where should businesses start in digital advertising?

For new and starting businesses (Or businesses new or novice to the digital world) it is best recommended that they start with organic marketing for the first few months to build their presence and learn the market. After the six month mark, they should have developed research and understanding about who the consumers are that visit their page. With this information, the business will have the needed information in creating a successful ad to create an informed strategy. While the paid marketing strategies are being used it is still vital that the website continues to be optimized and re-developed to continue the growth.

References:

Fishkin, R. (2017, April 21). Why Net Neutrality Matters for SEO and Web Marketing. MOZ. https://moz.com/blog/net-neutrality-seo-whiteboard-friday

WebFX. (n.d.). Organic Search vs Paid Search: The Marketer’s Handbook. Organic Search vs Paid Search: The Marketer’s Handbook. https://www.webfx.com/internet-marketing/organic-search-vs-paid-search.html#:~:text=While%20organic%20search%20focuses%20on,prominent%20spot%20in%20search%20results.