Paid-Ads or SEO: Which One Gives Best Results?
Posted by Ahmad Barirani in 
In a previous article, I have labeled SEO as being a form of spam. Well, I found this interesting article from Forbes that lists the best marketing techniques that can be used today. It all looks like spamming is pretty effective way of generating sales! My opinion is that this is so because of the persuasive power of a promotional page that is encountered by someone who got to that page by using a search engine. This persuasive power comes from the fact that we are not trained to recognize found-through-searching pages as having promotional content!
When it comes to traditional advertising (like on TV), we all have developed reflexes to identify and avoid advertising as they are shown. We have this part of our brain that detects patterns and is capable of understanding that a certain object is aimed at promoting a certain product. For example, we have the reflex of muting the TV and do stuff during commercial breaks. However, we are not used to the idea that people can use search engines and inflirtrate keywords to advertise. This is because most of us still have not added this new pattern of advertising to our cognitive repertoire.
The SEO professional’s job is to exploit this potential to the max. That is, promotional stuff has to be disguised as real content. And it must be subtle in the way that people will not be able to detect that someone is promoting a product or service. When people see a paid ad (like Google AdWords), they understand that it is for generating sales. But when it is a blog page, it is as if the guy next door was so happy about using a product.
My conclusion is that compared to paid-ads, SEO ads value from a marketing point of view. That value is about not giving the impression that people are dealing with ads.
Chris Peterson says:
Another great post Ahmad Barirani.
The pay for placement model is fine, if the result is clearly identified as a paid ad. The accusation is many search engines are displaying the ads in a deceptive manner to make the user think they are valid results. Let’s also remember that for all their power, search engines are very simple-minded when it comes to queries. So I guess doing SEO you can save budget but it time taken to get traffice.In paid adds you can get target and huge amount traffic within short period.