SEO Will Never be as Good as Paid Ads! | Ep. #637

In episode #637, Eric and Neil explain why paid ads are better than SEO. Tune in to hear why you should be focused more energy on paid ads.

TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:

  • [00:27] Today’s Topic: SEO Will Never be as Good as Paid Ads!
  • [00:34] Content pages generally rank higher than product pages.
  • [00:59] While paid ads are expensive, you can direct traffic to pages that will generate the most cash.
  • [01:10] The conversion rate is higher, because visitors will land on a page that is selling them something.
  • [01:29] You just can’t control SEO as well as you can paid ads.
  • [01:57] With paid ads, you can scale as much as you need to.
  • [02:20] VC’s really like pouring money into SaaS companies.
  • [02:44] Google and Facebook wouldn’t be worth what they are, if it wasn’t for paid ads.
  • [03:30] People are moving campaigns from TV to the Internet.
  • [04:05] Focus on paid ads before SEO, especially if you have a product or service.
  • [04:34] That’s it for today!
  • [04:37] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!

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The post SEO Will Never be as Good as Paid Ads! | Ep. #637 appeared first on Marketing School Podcast.

Full Transcript of The Episode

Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric siu: And today we are going to talk about why SEO will never be as good as paid ads. Why do you think that?

Neil Patel: You rank for a ton of keywords on Google, you're getting traffic typically to content pages, because your service page, your product pages won't rank as high as you want. It's usually blog posts or content pages. Yes, I do know product pages can rank, but in most cases it's content based. You do a search for anything, you mainly see content.
And everyone just expects to get a shit load of sales from that traffic. It never happens. With paid ads, yes it's expensive, but you can direct the traffic to the pages that generate you the most cash. And you get instant results. And not just that, the conversion is rate is higher, because those visitors are landing on a page where you can selling them something.
It's much harder, especially in today's world of Google, to rank pages that are selling on page one, especially high up.

Eric siu: Yeah, totally agreed. The other thing too is, yeah, I mean you can't control SEO as well as you can control paid advertising. So, what you can do is, we talk a lot about SEO and content, especially in the last couple of episodes, we talk about the long term and all that.
Now, if you've built up your traffic well enough with SEO, great, that's when you go into a Google, or a LinkedIn, or a Facebook, and you start to build out different audiences. Your custom audiences, your lookalike audience, you drive those people to try to take an action.
With paid ads, you can scale as much as you need to, off your own custom audiences, you can build off lookalikes, or you can just target the standard cold audience targeting that they have already, and the sky is the limit.
You don't have access to that kind of thing, where you can shut things on, off, and then get that kind of feedback loop, with SEO of content marketing. You have to take the time to figure that out. But when you combine the two, you get something really strong. But I do agree that when it comes to scale, this is why VC's really like pouring money into these different types of SAS companies, because you just pour money in there, and they'll let a sales team run paid ads. And for most of them, it's going to work out.

Neil Patel: Yeah, and they love that model, because it's scalable. SEO, yes, you can scale it over time, but you don't know if it's working or not. You don't get that instant gratification, you don't get instant results. And that's what makes paid advertising attractive. Google wouldn't be worth $700 billion plus if it wasn't for paid advertising. And they wouldn't be generating all that revenue if it wasn't effective for businesses.
They're bigger than any TV advertising company out there, right? Or they're bigger than television ads. Same with Facebook, if you look at Facebook, they're worth $4 or $500 billion, and it's because ads are converting really well.
It was funny, the other day I was reading an article about WPP, and how the CEO resigned. And if you look at that whole industry, they're saying that their stock has struggled, because digital advertising's kicking their butt. So I did a search for Publicist, Omnicom, and a few of the other competitors, because they're all public. And hey, they all had a similar trend, in which they're all going downwards. Why is this? People are moving budgets from television to paid advertising online.
It's so effective, I believe it's the best marketing channel out there.

Eric siu: Plus the tracking is better, you can do multi-channel attribution. It's just going to get stronger and stronger, you get offline attribution too. But again, I have to go back to it, if you can combine these channels with paid ads, you can really leverage it to the maximum. So, don't be lazy. Just because we're saying SEO will never be as good as paid ads doesn't mean that you should neglect SEO, because clearly, content marketing/SEO is still very much a big focus of what Neil and I do.

Neil Patel: Yes, and again, to clarify, we're not saying don't do SEO, we're saying focus on paid ads before you focus on SEO, especially if you have a product or service. If you don't have anything, by all means go do SEO content marketing, social media, all that kind of stuff first. But in general, when you're selling something, try to make paid work. If it doesn't with your product, add in some upsells and downsells, or create a funnel. You can use products like Click Funnels to do this, and that'll help you generate more revenue from each visitor. And that will open up more doors or opportunities to spend more, or go after new keywords with your paid campaigns.

Eric siu: All right, so that's it for today. But before we go, go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to check out our marketing that grow your business, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Speaker 1: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.

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