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It might seem crazy to spend part of your online marketing budget on Paid Search (Like Google Adwords), especially when you are squarely focused on bringing in traffic organically via a search engine optimization effort, however it might just be the smartest money you could spend.  Here’s why:

The beauty of Paid Search traffic is you can start and stop it at will, and choose which channel (keywords) you want to receive traffic from.  This means you can test out your entire list of possible keywords, from your SEO campaign, and see which keywords actually bring traffic (clickers), and more importantly, which keywords are most likely to result in sales (highest revenue per click).  Just like with any effort, you will generally find 80% of your sales comes from just 20% of your potential keyword list; even if all your keywords are narrowly focused with seemingly relevant topical relevance.  Why aren’t the other 80% of visitors buying? That is beyond the scope of this post and you can figure that out later with additional testing anyhow, but now you know where the most valuable traffic for your business will come from and can be at least 5 times more focused on your SEO campaign, since it’s probably less of a priority to rank in Google for keywords which do not send buyers.

Another benefit of Paid Search is to refine your marketing messaging to find the best language that gets people to click.  On any Google result, you are competing against 10 or so other entries on the page (more if you include the sponsored results); even if you show up on the first page of Google you must make sure your site is the most likely to get clicked on.  With Paid Search you are writing ads with ultimately the same goal- to get the click –So you can use your ads to test out different angles and messaging to see what messaging gets people to click.  Once you have thoroughly tested your ad copy in your Paid Search campaign, and picked a few winning ads, you can use this to help create keyword-rich HTML titles and description tags which will get people to click on your organic Google result of your SEO’d pages. And wouldn’t you know it, Google actually rewards you with better rankings if you consistently get a higher click-thru rate on your Google result listing compared to your competitors.

So now that you’ve identified your most profitable keywords, and the copy which is going to get people to click on your site’s search engine result organic listing, should you stop your Paid Search campaign? NO! The more times you appear in a search engine result page, the more relevance is established for your site. The average search user has been bred to associate those results with little diversity as those where there is less ambiguity of what the “right” answer (according to Google) is to their query.  If your site shows up multiple times in a Google result (once for your organic result, once for your paid search ad, and possibly a few other listings for “site links” or local results) the user may conclude that Google favor’s your business and be more likely to follow this implied recommendation.  This may also work to your advantage in increasing your click-thru rate and again increasing your position in the rankings.

Paid Search may seem redundant or a wasted expense to the unknowledgeable website owner in search of traffic, but as I illustrated above, it should be the first move you make whether you are entertaining an organic search engine campaign or not.  The ability to test and refine your targeting, of both your keywords and your messaging, is priceless and would otherwise result in you spending money trying to obtain potentially worthless traffic with little to no return on investment.