We cannot deny the fact that your competition is getting better with each passing day. Without the use of certain tools and strategies, you will see yourself falling behind.
Every marketing strategy will fall under two categories – organic or paid. In the past, many smaller businesses relied solely on organic traffic and many still do. The most common method for growing organically is ranking high in search results through the use of SEO. These businesses constantly have to fight for their position to keep their traffic and revenue steady. Many businesses scaled successfully relying only on SEO and ranking high, however, is it still possible?
The short answer is no. With the world-wide-web growing at a rate of 3000% per year your business will never fall short of the competition. At the minimum, every business will try to grow organically because at the end of the day it is “free” growth. However, to achieve this free growth, because of the competition, businesses have started spending millions on teams to get them to first place and there’s a high chance your company can’t keep up.
If you delve a bit deeper and reverse engineer the two categories you’ll soon realize that they function the same. Both types of strategies are used to increase impressions, clicks, conversions, and ultimately profit. With paid marketing the impressions are free, you pay a small amount for each click and it only takes a couple of days to see optimizations. Paid marketing also has the advantage of reaching audiences who don’t even know they need your product/service yet. On the other hand, with raising your search rank you pay an agency upfront for impressions, each click after is free and it can take weeks to see changes have an effect. You will also only get traffic from people specifically searching for your product/service.
No one can deny the importance of a strong SEO strategy to build your brand online, but with the kind of competition at hand, businesses will have to reconsider where they allocate their budget. Especially for companies with a smaller budget, paying upfront to get impressions and clicks (from keywords they don’t even know will convert) is just a risk they shouldn’t take.
In conclusion, SEO is still worth working on if you have the time/budget however paid marketing should be your number 1 priority. The power to constantly optimize and see the results within just a couple of days is too valuable to ignore.
Does your company need a strong paid marketing strategy? Schedule a meeting below.
