Every day new clients come to us and ask what they should do to make their website a success: advertising on social media or search engine optimisation?
To keep it short and give you the answer straight away: both should be done at the same time and, if the budget allows, you should also run Google Ads campaigns.
Search engine optimisation and how long it takes
The practice of search engine optimisation is a process that can literally go on for ever. Optimising your website for search engines is an ongoing marathon, never a sprint.
With what is known as seo, if we start today, the results of our work may show in 2 months or more when we are talking about competitive keywords.
In essence, search engine optimisation covers the following:
- improving the speed of our website
- improving the structure of our site
- creating content
- building links to our site
- fixing errors on our site
Content and links should be created continuously for our website, and not only during the SEO process. Your website or e-shop should get better every day, as we also explain in our article on looking after your website and e-shop.
If I do SEO, how long will I stay first on Google?
What we need to understand is that we are not the only ones who can optimise our website: everyone else can too. Remember that search engine optimisation is not a service you pay for and then come first. The question is who does it better. If our competitors are optimising too, they can hold on to their positions if they are already ranking above us. If we do it better and for longer, then we will come first.
What do I gain by optimising my website for search engines?
By optimising your website or e-shop for search engines, you win the most important prize everyone is after online: free traffic. In other words, users who visit your website without you paying for them.
So it makes sense to start optimising our website from day one!
Social media advertising: when should I start?
The truth is that if you don’t start some kind of advertising for your website or e-shop from day one, it won’t get any traffic or visits.
We are not even talking about sales, because in the first days of an e-shop sales are very hard to achieve.
We have written in an earlier article about what needs to happen for your e-shop to make sales and succeed, so we won’t go into it further here.
The advertising budget needs to be fairly large when your e-shop launches, because nobody knows you yet, and it has to be a continuous effort.
In conclusion: advertising and SEO
From all of the above, we can see that we should run both advertising and SEO from the first day our e-shop or website goes live, with the aim of success further down the line.
One kind of advertising doesn’t rule out the other, and neither is better than the other.
In general, we should use an analytics tool to measure how well each promotion or advertising channel performs and whether it makes us a profit. Then we can decide whether to stop, or whether we believe it will pay off in the end and carry on.
We have never said that running an e-shop or a website is easy, let alone optimising it for search engines or even advertising it on social media.
At web-mate we are here to give you solutions and help you succeed on this difficult journey.
Leave a comment