As soon as someone thinks about building a website, or has just finished one, they face a big question: how to promote it so that people online can find it. As we have said in earlier articles, it matters a lot to have a good-looking website or a blog that gives customers a sense of security and credibility, but it matters even more that existing and new customers can find you online.
As we like to say, one person can have a beautiful shop up on a mountain, and someone else can have a shop that isn’t as nice, right in the centre of a big city, and even sell the same products at higher prices than the first one up on the mountain. The one with the shop in the city will have the most success for the least effort, because people can reach it easily.
When we talk about online advertising, there are mainly two kinds you come across in the Greek market. The first is paid advertising, and the second is advertising that comes from organic search results or from sharing interesting articles, generally without paying a company (Facebook, Google, Instagram, X) to show your website somewhere.
Which kind of advertising is best?
The honest answer is neither: it depends on each website’s situation. Obviously it is better not to pay and still get visitors, or potential buyers if we are talking about an e-shop, and have free advertising for your site. But that can’t happen in every case.
If we have a website that wants to reach the top 3 positions for a keyword such as car parts it is very unlikely that we will promote the website and see results within the first 3–4 months. The effort and cost of organically promoting the website for that keyword, plus the cost of “maintaining” the position, would also be huge (it would take a lot of well-written articles and many billable hours from whichever agency takes on the project).
However, if you start out with a Google Ads campaign the results will be immediate (as long as the Google Ads campaign is set up properly) and measurable. So if someone sees it as an investment and believes in their e-shop, they could start with a Google Ads campaign and put the profit it brings into promoting their website in search engines.
One more thing to consider about the organic promotion of a website is that it will never be 100% optimised, and we should always keep trying to improve it.
Done properly, both methods of search engine promotion are worth it
The car parts example above was actually the worst possible example of website SEO we could have given. Quite simply, in modern website promotion, whether organic or through Google Ads, the keywords we should use and go after are the so-called long-tail keywords. So it would definitely be better to work on optimising a website for search engines with a phrase like “opel astra car parts”. The effort would be smaller and so would the cost. And if we targeted that phrase and other long-tail keywords with Google Ads, the result in terms of profit would be bigger, because someone who searches for something more general is more likely to be just browsing. In Google Ads for an e-shop, where we are after a good conversion rate, we don’t just want traffic: we want the customer.
Analysis, analysis, analysis for successful ads
What any online advertising needs, whether it is search engine optimisation, a Google Ads campaign or Meta ads is the right analysis and the right keyword targeting, so that they bring the biggest possible profit at the lowest possible cost.
There are many tools for search engines. At WebMate we use Ahrefs and SE Ranking, and by combining the 2 we have seen excellent results. SE Ranking in particular has a banner above, so you can head over and try it for free. Both keep adding new tools and we recommend them wholeheartedly. Don’t try to start any advertising if you don’t have a tool to track your progress, because tools like these give you incredibly detailed measurements.
So, PPC or SEO?
As you have probably gathered, the answer is a combination of the 2. The most important thing is to measure both, meaning we know through Google Analytics, or any other program, how each method performs, so that we can expand it further and perhaps reduce the effort we put into one type of advertising compared with the other. After all, our goal is to bring customers to our website at the lowest possible advertising cost, or, in the case of Meta campaigns, it may be to strengthen our brand. Finally, something we often forget: whether we use SEO or PPC, that method should be part of our business’s overall marketing.
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