I pretty well have this conversation with every client who wants me to build a website or revamp their current website or do some sort of internet marking campaign. The conversation goes something like this:
“Well, we can drive traffic to your site through Google Adwords and then after a while, working on adding content to your site and boost your natural rankings.” – Me
“I get traffic for free? Why can’t we work on me getting traffic for free? ” Customer.
Now, on the surface, this is a very reasonable question. Paid traffic is here today, gone tomorrow. Effort spent on organic SEO or, building up your website to attract more traffic, seems more like an investment. You paid somebody to boost rankings in your site, and you get that boost everyday, for free, for a long time afterwards.
But this thinking is also wrong, because you don’t really want traffic. Trust me on traffic. Hey, if you really want traffic, then I can help you, because I can send you tons of traffic, super cheap traffic from China. I can give you thousands of visitors of day to your website.
But you don’t want that. What you really want is sales. And for sales to happen, you need traffic that converts in to sales. And for you to get good converting traffic, you need to know which keywords bring in traffic that converts.
Now, the problem with organic is that it can take some time to rank for keywords. Weeks, even months. So you eventually rank for the keywords that you picked and start getting some traffic. But what if you picked the wrong keywords? I mean, you get traffic, you even get engaged traffic that stays on your site for awhile, but it doesn’t lead to customers that buy stuff? What do you do now?
That’s why most internet marketers push the paid ad campaign at the start. A small campaign can easily target hundreds or even thousands of keywords and in less than a month, you can get an idea which keywords convert into sales. Oftentimes, it’s surprising which keywords actually make the customer pull out their credit card.
And after that, then you can spend some time (and money, oh yes it takes some money) to build towards ranking naturally for that keyword.