How Advertising Boosts SEO

by Charles Pobee-Mensah, Director of Digital Marketing

SEO is supposed to be free, right? Some Google bot checks out your website, makes note of the words on it and then shows it to people who search for those words. Free listing! Okay, okay. I know you know it isn’t that simple. But one of the strangest parts of SEO is the fact that, oftentimes, you have to run paid ads to rank well. What’s going on here, extortion? Probably not.

We don’t claim to have any insider knowledge about how Google works, but there are a lot of well-known and logical reasons for this phenomenon. Let’s take a look at some.

Running Ads Gives You A Technical Advantage

Did you know that 380 new websites are created every minute? That’s a lot for Google to keep up with. Why does that matter? Because, when you run ads on Google, they need to scan your site in order to score it. They want to make sure that your site is a good fit for the ads that you’re showing. 

This means that you’re higher on the priority list than those 380 new sites. When you make a favorable update to your site, Google is more likely to know about it when you’re advertising with them. This gives you a small advantage, but there’s more.

Running Ads Gives You A Knowledge Advantage

Running Google ads gives you or your marketing team immediate results. If you have an ad going to a low-quality page, it will start to show quickly. The ad will cost you more and perform poorly. This leads advertisers to make quicker website optimizations when running Google ads.

Also, when you run ads you also can tell what people searched, how much they clicked, and what messaging was the most effective. This all can inform the marketing and SEO decisions that you make. That same information is, at best, much less detailed when you only have SEO tools available. But perhaps the biggest most impactful difference is what comes next.

Running Ads Gives You An Impression Advantage

When you’re advertising, you’re making an impression on potential customers. This changes their behavior. If they see your ad in one place, they’re more likely to click on your “free listing” later. They recognize you a bit more now. Why wouldn’t they? Let’s break it down. 

If you run visual ads like web banners and Facebook ads, potential customers now have a picture to put with your name when you show up in Google. When you run ads on Google, you can now show up at the top of the page. You may even show up twice on the same page. Once in an ad and once organically. More and better impressions lead to more clicks on your free one.

Additionally, ads can be targeted and optimized in ways that SEO can’t. You can pick the words you want to show up for and the ones you don’t want to show up for. You can dictate exactly what the message is. And you can target based on a host of demographic and location information.

Ads also give your audience more options like the ability to click to make a phone call right from the ad and flexible ways to display information. 

Simply put, when you advertise, you can leave an impression that is not available with SEO, but affects SEO. Our own Shane O’Neill called SEO and paid ads the Yin and Yang of digital marketing for a reason.

If you’re thinking of SEO as a way to avoid paying for ads, you might have a long road ahead of you. If, however, you’re interested in supercharging your SEO with advertising, you might have a lot of good things in store for you.

Are you looking for an agency with experience with both SEO and advertising in the jewelry industry? Contact suits@fruchtman.com.