June 11th, 2007 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

This is a question I see quite a lot. Is it really worth paying for traffic when you already rank well for your primary keyword targets? It all depends on a number of things, but in general if you are selling a product or service from your website then the answer is yes!

In my experience free traffic is always best, after all you can’t beat free, but as long as you’re careful there is no reason not to use both. The most important thing to think about is ROI (Return On Investment). There is no harm in paying for traffic as long as that traffic makes more money than it costs you. In order to check this you’ll need to carefully monitor your paid traffic campaigns to make sure that they are giving you a good ROI. If you’re using Adwords then Googles makes this very easy by integrating Adwords data into its own free analytics service.

Adwords has several advantages over natural search placement. For a start your natural search results are vulnerable, very vulnerable in fact to how Google wants to rank you. It is a dangerous marketing ploy to rely solely on natural search rankings for generating business. Here today, gone tomorrow is not that unusual, even with the best SEO in the world Google is the master of what does and doesn’t appear in its natural search results. With Adwords you can at least have some influence over where you appear, if your business is ligitimate then you can have a big say so, the more you pay the higher you appear. Just keep that ROI in mind.

The second big advantage of AdWords over natural search is that it allows you to test out new products and pages. You are buying tragetted traffic which is a great way to find out how your pages will convert to customers. Experimentation is a vital part of web marketing and AdWords gives you the tools you need to experiment with freedom.

So even if you rank top for natural search results, don’t forget Adwords.

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Paul B