Investing in SEO pays off when you want search traffic that does not stop the moment the ad budget runs out. SEO or buying traffic from ads? Below we compare both approaches: costs, how long results take and the situations in which each of them makes sense.
SEO is worth it because organic search traffic reaches people who are looking for a specific solution, and you don’t pay for every click. Choosing between SEO and buying traffic through ad campaigns such as Google Ads is one of the most important decisions in a marketing strategy. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing a website for search engines so that it ranks high in organic results. This makes the site more visible to users who type specific queries related to the products or services you offer. Importantly, organic search traffic is often more valuable than ad traffic, because people who find a site this way are usually actively looking for that solution, which leads to higher conversion.
SEO takes time and consistent effort. Unlike paid ad campaigns, its results don’t show up right away. It requires technical optimization of the site, valuable content and a profile of links pointing to the website. It is a long-term strategy, but also a very cost-effective one, because once you reach a high position in search results, it can bring traffic for a long time without paying for each click. With PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns such as Google Ads, you pay for every visit, which means traffic disappears the moment the campaign ends. SEO allows for steadier business growth and independence from a constant ad budget.
This doesn’t mean paid ads are useless. Quite the opposite: they can be a great complement to an SEO strategy, especially early on, when the site doesn’t yet have enough visibility in search engines. PPC campaigns bring traffic immediately and let you test how well different offers or content variants perform. In the long run, however, SEO is the more economical option, since it doesn’t generate an ongoing cost per click, and a position once reached in organic results can pay off for a long time. In practice, the best strategy combines both methods: investing in SEO as the foundation of long-term visibility and using paid campaigns to boost results and bring in extra traffic at key moments. Your choice of marketing activities should match your company’s individual needs and resources, and an effective advertising strategy is one that maximizes return on investment while keeping costs low.
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Before you start optimizing your website
When you start SEO for your website, you can’t skip the first and most important step: choosing the right keywords wisely. If you have experience with online advertising, you can try building your own list of phrases you want to rank at the top for. If you don’t feel up to it, it’s better to leave this to professionals. Poorly chosen keywords won’t bring visits, or the traffic they bring won’t turn into orders. In short, poorly chosen keywords will probably bring minimal profit, or in extreme cases the cost of SEO may exceed the income from customers coming from search engines. Well-chosen phrases will not only increase the number of visitors to your site, but also improve the ratio of visitors to orders placed (revenue).
I’ve been doing SEO for a long time and my site still ranks low
This problem affects many website owners. There can be many reasons. The most common ones are:
- very competitive phrases were chosen, and for those results may take up to a year to appear (even when SEO is done correctly),
- SEO is being done the wrong way (“a friend told me that to rank high I need to add my site to 10 directories a day”) - if you’re not quite sure what you’re doing with your site, or you handed SEO over to amateurs, it may be worth hiring online marketing professionals instead,
- the site was optimized in a way that broke the webmaster guidelines and the search engine algorithm penalized it with a filter (a penalty that shows up as a drop in the site’s search rankings)
SEO: why should you leave it to specialists?
Website SEO services require knowledge, experience and access to advanced analytics tools. It’s not a job for amateurs whose knowledge comes only from occasionally reading online forums or SEO blogs. Effective optimization requires not just theory, but above all the ability to analyze competitors, test different strategies and keep monitoring the results. SEO specialists know which techniques bring long-term results and how to avoid practices that could harm a site.
Poorly executed SEO may not only fail to deliver the expected results, but can actually hurt a site’s visibility. Unskilled SEO often leads to search engine filters, which cause a significant drop in rankings. In extreme cases, when prohibited techniques known as black hat SEO are used, a site can be removed from the search engine index entirely, which means users will no longer see it (a so-called BAN). Consequences like these are hard to reverse and can lead to serious financial and reputational losses for the site owner.
That’s why it’s so important for SEO to be handled by people with the right qualifications and tools. Professional SEO is not only about optimizing content for search engine algorithms, but also about link quality, the site’s technical structure and compliance with Google’s guidelines. Investing in well-executed SEO is an investment in steady business growth that brings long-term benefits and increases the number of valuable visitors to your site.
Keep in mind that unskilled SEO will not only fail to improve a site’s position in search results, and therefore fail to increase traffic, but can also expose it to filters from search engine algorithms. In extreme cases, when unethical techniques are used and webmaster guidelines are systematically violated, the site can be removed from the search engine index entirely (a so-called BAN). You can read more about ethical and unethical SEO techniques on Wikipedia.
