Is Adwords worth it over paid SEO staff for same amount?

[froggyboy604]

Yes, I think Adwords can be worth it to pay for Adwords over paid SEO since you are guaranteed traffic based on how much you pay for Adwords, and how well you know how to use it for buying cheaper keyword traffic.

One of my highest traffic days for my website was when I used a free 100 dollar gift certificate I got for being an Adsense Publisher member.

But, buying paid SEO does not always seem to be the best way to go since you can end up paying thousands and not have much or any traffic boost if search engines made changes to the way they rank pages.

 

[kavin]

Adwords has nothing to do with SEO. If you mean paid traffic boosting services, they i would say, both are useless.

But advertisement from similar sites/forums. Its much better and brings good members.

 

[MrJohn]

I can not imagine why anyone would pay for Adwords, when paying for the right SEO can get you consistent traffic for a longer period of time. It makes no sense to me. Adwords is just a quick fix to your traffic problems, not a permanent solution.

 

[froggyboy604]

Wouldn't Adwords be a good for a newer website which needs a quick boost in traffic for the Holidays if they run a Holiday Shopping related forum or blog like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, or to quickly promote a contest which is almost over?

But, I agree with you advertising on similar forums, and websites are a great way to get traffic, and SEO have longer lasting traffic ranks over time.

 

[Tecca]

Adwords is the best way of advertising. Why do people want to get backlinks to their websites? To be put on the top of Google. What does adwords do? put you at the top of Google (temporarily). Nobody really cares about the other search engines, and for a good reason. You don't need to. And you don't want to if you're looking to make real money. Focus on one thing at a time and you'll go far.

Adwords is great because it gets you targeted traffic. And that's what you need to sell your product. You need to determine the conversion rate from your Adwords campaigns. There are right and wrong ways (all very common) of setting up your campaign. Test and see what works.

 

[froggyboy604]

^I agree Adwords are better for product based sites which center around selling products to a specific category of buyers like "used college math books" .

I believe Groupon, Host Gator and Facebook also used Adwords or similar programs in the beginning and still do to market their site in a quick amount of time to get more leads, and costumers. But, their products are very good, and they have a huge budget for marketing.

Plus, people who found websites through an Ad might naturally link to it if the website is good, bloggers have nothing to write about, so they write about a website they found on an Ad, become an affiliate to promote the website/product if they like the website or product, or just want to make a quick buck or two through affiliate marketing commissions.

In fact, I found out Facebook is still using adwords to try to take adwords costumers away from google and using FB ads. I search for Facebook Ads an Google and found a sponsored result on Google which leads to http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?ca ... 0026dec058

If I had a great product like software which I know a lot of people need or want, and have some money, I give ads a try since by the time I get high enough on the search rankings a competitor might already made a better product/copied my product, or my product might become irrelevant/obsolete to a lot of people like Photo copiers, Fax machines, and prepaid calling cards.

But, Adwords won't make much sense for free informational websites since they don't typically make any or a lot of money in my experience.

 

[Mr. Goodie2Shoes]

Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing are two different things 😛

 

[etc]

paying for Adwords won't be for long term traffic though

 

[froggyboy604]

Indeed, it is not a long term traffic plan, unless your site is very good, and Adword visitors bookmark your site to visit your site on a daily basis, or link to your site from their blog or website because they found your site to be a valuable website to share with their visitors.

 

[PoBoy]

I agree with Tecca and froggy on the product points. You'll use PPC if you're a lawyer who could potentially get $10k+ from a single click and you'll pay big for that Adwords spot.

PPC for forums or most blogs is a waste because you won't likely won't see the return on investment. SEO is the way to go if you're targeting keywords with less competition. Ranking for "general chat forum" would be foolish with SEO, but maybe one of the exceptions to using PPC for forums.

 

[froggyboy604]

Indeed, lawyers, insurance, banks, and sellers can benefit more from PPC, but I'm not sure if a person will just pick a lawyer based on a PPC ad since if your going to sue someone, you want to pick a lawyer who has a proven record of winning most cases, and getting a big cash settlement for their client.

I think Facebook, Twitter, Social Media, review sites, and forums can be a good way for lawyers to get positive reviews from previous clients who won hefty rewards thanks to the lawyers services.

I think if you plan on selling your forum, blog, or social network to AOL, Gawker, Yahoo, or a bigger company, Paid to Click can be worth it since if your blog or forum has "great" content, and a lot of visitors register, subscribe, and promote your content on Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Tagged, Reddit, 4Chan, blogs, forums, FARK, Google Plus, Spinn, and you get a lot of direct and refferal traffic from regular readers companies may be interested in buying your website.

I read somewhere that TechCrunch, Huffington Post sold for Millions of Dollars to AOL.com . Myspace sold to Fox for millions

But, very few bloggers, and website owners are good at keeping most of their website visitors interested in their site, and voluntarily promoting the blogs content for long periods of time.

 

[PoBoy]

You or I may not pick that lawyer based on PPC, because we know how the system works. Aunt Betty is more likely to pick the PPC ad and if the lawyer has an excellent landing page, as they should, it will include all great reviews and get Aunt Betty hyped and convinced that lawyer is the way to go.

The later part of your post is everyone's dream 😛 Gladly get bought out for millions of dollars. At it's core, there's really no trick to it. Make a site that has unique content and a reason for people to come back. Or a site that has awesome user generated content.