Should You Focus on Paid Ads and SEO in Tandem?

This is a transcript of a chat with Kevin Willett of the "3 questions with..." YouTube show. You can watch the episode here, or read on for more.

Kevin: I want to talk a little bit about SEO versus paid ads. When do I need to consider paid ads? You know sometimes you want to focus on SEO; maybe because we don't want to spend money on paid ads…but at some point in time do we have to consider it? Should we consider it?

Emily: That's a really good question. I was actually talking and waiting for my clients about this recently. If anyone's watched our conversations before they know that I am an SEO person. I'm all about SEO. But the thing is sometimes—and I'll be the first one to admit this to a client—sometimes a paid ad will serve you better. And there's two instances where I really see this being the case. One, if you are trying to target customers in a very local area; like I want to serve customers just like within walking distance of my house. In this case I'm still going to want to work on SEO because it'll help me over time but running ads within like Google Maps or Yelp is going to be one of the most immediate effective ways that I can start generating business revenue. The second instance where paid ads are useful is if you want to target an audience say nationally but you want to be hyper, hyper, hyper specific.

So if you and I were working on an SEO project I could, with content, get your website in front of a group like “parents in the United States who have a college degree and have two kids.” We could get fairly broad, and we could get a big pool of people. But let's say you wanted to narrow it down to “stay at home moms who are mothers of only girls who spend X amount a year on back to school clothes and have been married for 10 years.” That kind of data is super granular and you can't really target audiences that are that specific just through SEO. Parents, yes, but not necessarily that whole laundry list of requirements. In this case you'd want to run paid ads because paid ads are structured in a way that lets you get super specific about who you're targeting right down to what websites they visited in the past week.

Kevin: If I go to paid ads, can I lighten up on SEO? Or should I still be working on SEO at the same time?

Emily: You should be working on both at the same time! Paid ads are something that is an immediate investment with an immediate return. You’re going to pay a lot of money, sometimes, to run the paid ads but you're going to start seeing results quickly. The catch is that the minute you stop paying for those ads, the clicks and the traffic that goes away. You can't get it back unless you run those ads again, whereas SEO is more of a longer term investment. It pays for itself over time. You might invest in paid ads for three months and only see results for three months. You can invest in SEO for three months and see results for three years. So I recommend doing both.

Kevin: let me just throw a random question at you now. I've been seeing in the news about Google being a monopoly. How can it impact a small business owner? Is that going to have any impact on my marketing? Should I care?

Emily: That's actually not as random as it might sound because Google is the company we pay for a lot of our ads online. So it's very timely. Courts have said at this point that Google search is an illegal monopoly; They've got too much of control over the market share on search. Now, this doesn't change anything for you as a business owner or for anyone who is watching. Google services are going to continue to work the same way they have if you're say running paid Google ads. Your ads are still going to go out, your accounts will be fine. So you just business as usual for you. This is really going to be a longer term event that we'll see play out. It could wind up that Google gets hit with some fines; maybe they have to allow it make it easier to use other search engines on Android phones. In that case, in the long run, nothing really changes on our end.

Or it could play out that Google winds up having to split up parts of its search business, sell things off, and divest. We don't know yet what that'll look like. But know that you don't have to make any changes immediately. I would suggest, though, that if you run a business where you're heavily reliant on Google Analytics, Google Ads, or other Google tools that you start looking at how you can change your SEO strategy or your ad strategy to better target users of other search engines. Because while Google is a search engine that we all sort of default to there are a lot of people who still use

search engines like Bing, DuckDuckGo, and some other smaller ones. I've been working with some people that I know and in my network to help them figure out if are there viable alternatives to Google Analytics and how can we connect with people and other search engines. And that may become more important in the future based on this ruling.

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