There are 2 sides to search engine marketing, some people call it left side & right side, I call it organic listing or paid listing.
The listings on the left are organic & those on the right are paid.
We will look at both sides & compare them accordingly.
Paid Listing - Advantages Paid search listing is so much faster than organic listing since you just need to set up your account, make payments & your ad will show in literally minutes.
You can track our marketing results to find out which ad gives you the best returns & the fact that you can split test your ads makes everything so much easier.
Paid Listing - Disadvantages You must know how to research your market & find relevant keywords.
Within your campaigns, you also must know how to properly set up your keywords, ads, landing pages & tracking if not, you will lose money.
When you are testing new offers, new pages, news ads, sometimes you might lose money & because everything is fast, you can lose money fast as well as profit fast.
Organic Listing - Advantages Organic listing is almost free & just require you to do a little more research & work.
Most of the tools you need, you can get them for free or for a very low price.
When you start optimizing for a few keywords, sometimes you end up ranking for more keywords than that.
Also, more people seem to trust organic listings more than paid search advertising.
Organic Listing - Disadvantages It is so much slower than paid listing because you need to start with a well optimized website & then you must have other sites linking back to you.
The learning curve is much longer than you think.
You can track your traffic, however, you cannot split test the way your listing shows up on the organic search results.
However, you can still write compelling copy to help get more clicks.
Summary Start with paid listing, once you know which keywords convert, optimize your site to rank well on the organic side.
In this way, you will be listed on both the left & right side of search results.