Marketing your business or brand is an integral part of any modern strategy. With an unprecedented number of ways for people to discover you, taking advantage of every opportunity possible is just smart behavior. Digital marketing in particular is responsible for such a wide array of options now available to brands, with each offering key benefits and drawbacks.

Two major forms of digital marketing – paid search advertising and search engine optimization – get a lot of discussion. With one relying upon dedicated ad budgets and the other relying upon content strategies, time and hard work, some debate which solution is the better option.

Today, we’ll take a look at Google Ads and SEO specifically, helping to answer the question of which one is right for you.

Are You Cash-Poor?

Generally speaking, brands that have resources available to them can benefit from a combination of both organic and paid search engine marketing strategies. By being able to hire SEO gurus and manage ad campaigns, pulling in the most views, clicks and sales possible is a legitimate reality.

However and for those without access to meaningful ad budgets, SEO offers a free-to-low-cost alternative for garnering traffic. Given that pinging your website to search engines doesn’t cost anything, creating content doesn’t cost anything and learning about the nature of SEO itself is free, this makes it perfect for those who can’t afford to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars per week on paid search ads.

Are You in Retail?

Online brands seeking to drive traffic to their websites and products need quick results. While dominating one or more niches via search engine optimization can drive a consistent flow of traffic to your website without the need of expensive ad budgets, rapid results for retailers are almost always going to involve using Google Ads rather than SEO.

While both strategies of course can (and should) be used, Google Ads allows retailers to deploy ads immediately, reaching specific audiences most interested in their products. With SEO, major results can take weeks or even months to achieve, depending on how contested the niche is presently. Because of time often being of the essence for retailers, paid search marketing strategies are the better choice here.

Are You Patient?

The great thing about search engine optimization is that anybody with enough energy and dedication can take advantage of it and succeed. However, the biggest trade-off is time: if you want to start pinging your website to search engines and be prominent in results, it can take a long period of time before results are obvious.

Because of this, it requires a lot of patience to pursue any SEO strategy from start to finish. Established brands with lots of content and long-standing web presences may find SEO easier to pursue, but fresh brands just starting out will spend months or more fighting against the gravity of search engines and competitors. As such, patient people can make the most of SEO, but those who want results rapidly from search traffic will have to pay.

The best brands typically use both search engine marketing strategies to achieve optimal results, but this isn’t always possible. Whether your brand is new or simply strapped for resources, choosing the right choice really depends on what results you want in the short-term, how much energy you can dedicate to the process and what you’re offering to online audiences.