Comparing Google Organic Searches vs. Google Adwords (Pay-per Click Ads)

This article is designed to explain the basic differences between promoting your online business with organic search engine optimization practices, and Google Adwords, or “pay-per click” ads.

Organic SEO is a term that has been used to explain the process of optimizing your website without the use of paid ads. Organic SEO mainly includes two different forms of optimization.

On-site SEO:

On-site, or “in-page” SEO refers to the optimizing that happens within your website on each page. These include linking strategies from page to page, keyword and content placement and creation, proper page titling and meta-tags for each page.

Whenever launching a new website online, it is important to keep these very basic practices incorporated within each page, because without them, they will directly affect your search engine rankings.

Off-Site SEO:

Off-Site, often referred to as “off-page” SEO is all of the optimizing done outside of the actual pages of your own website. There are many measures and actions to take to perform “off-page” techniques, but the most standard has to do with back links.

Back links are arguably the most important part of off-page SEO efforts. Back links are links on other people’s website that link back to your website. Google and other search engines measure relevancy of your website by determining how important your site is. If you’re ranked with 10 other websites that all have a very good ranking, this will undoubtedly help your rankings. If you are linked to from 10 really horrible sites that get little to no traffic, this can result in not so great rankings.

Google Adsense, also referred to as “pay-per click ads,” is an entirely different way of marketing your website online. With pay-per click ads, you pay Google a certain price/per click to have your website listed on the top of the page under certain search terms. You first start by choosing which keywords you want to target your search results on. From there, you bid on a price for search results. For instance, if you do a search using the Google Adwords Tool, and determine that the keywords you want to target are $4.00/click on average, you can offer more and almost guarantee the top position in the top ads.

The pay-per click ads are located above and to the side of the normal listings on a Google search. They are normally tinted yellow to signify that they are paid ads.

Organic SEO vs Pay Per Clickr
The debate of which method of marketing is better, Organic SEO vs PPC ads has been going on for a long time. Both can prove to be very effective, but lots of data shows that it is all dependants upon the industry you are trying to compete in.

For instance, some people looking for a house cleaning service locally may be turned off by the paid ads, as they seem to resemble “spam.” Others who are looking for a certain product may find pay-per click ads effective as they may explain a sale in the description.

In the end, the best thing to do is take some time and research what other companies are doing in your industry. From our experience, most product-based websites do well with PPC ads, and most service-based businesses drive more traffic through organic SEO.