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SEO vs AdWords: Why good SEO is a better investment

Google’s AdWords program is a great way to build the profile of a new business quickly, but if you take the time to invest in some good, solid SEO (search engine optimisation), you’ll save yourself a pile of money in the long term and you’ll reap the rewards for years.

I guarantee you that with the right SEO you will be able to get the results you want after a year, no matter what business you’re in, whether you’re targeting ‘car loans’, or ‘Gold Coast gynaecologist’. All it takes is Google’s webmaster guidelines and a clever SEO firm; nothing else.

SEO vs AdWords — Case Studies

One of our clients is a relatively small (compared to a bank that is), but nationally-recognised finance firm specialising in loans for cars, trucks and boats. After a year of search engine optimisation work their three websites sit reasonably comfortably at number 1 in Google’s ‘natural’ results when you search for ‘car loans‘, ‘truck loans‘ and ‘boat loans‘. They’re beating all the major banks in the country, along with around 14 million other websites all vying for the space and no less than 457 competitors bidding for AdWords on those keywords.

If our client had to buy the #1 position in AdWords for the next 12 months it would cost them $168,000. I won’t tell you what their SEO campaign cost, but it wasn’t anywhere near even a quarter of that. In my experience with hundreds of clients in a wide variety of industries over many years, if you spend 12 months on SEO you can get the same results as AdWords for about a quarter of the price, and your position will still be there for at least another 12 months once the campaign is over.

Interested? Let’s look at the figures…

The minimum AdWords bid for the keyword ‘car loans’ is around $0.10. There are 457 companies all bidding for that keyword, so the company at #1 is probably paying at least $4.67 per click. It’s probably more than that, but that’s a pretty good guess based on the data — plenty of popular keywords cost that much for the top spots.

Now, let’s say that the company at #1 gets 100 clicks a day (our client gets considerably more than that from their natural result, but let’s use that round number) - after a year they will have spent $168,000, and then their ads will disappear completely.

If the industry was less competitive, the ads obviously wouldn’t cost as much, but then again, nor would the SEO. We’ve helped clients who only spend $1200 a year on AdWords achieve the same natural results on our $399 basic package. The scale applies across the board, I’ve seen it time and time again.

AdWords will give your business a quick boost. Good SEO is a much better long-term investment and it will keep earning you money long after you’ve stopped paying for it.