SEO vs. Google AdWords Advertising: Which Campaign Should You Choose?

SEO and Google AdWords are both powerful forms of online marketing. With competition on the digital market growing fiercer by the day, comparing SEO and Google AdWords to decide which one works best has become essential for businesses that want to define the optimal strategy for their advertising campaigns.

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The Difference Between SEO and Google AdWords

Google is the most popular search engine, not only worldwide but also in Vietnam, and most of us think of Google whenever we need to look something up.

That is why, for a business to reach users effectively, appearing at the top of the search results page matters: the higher the position, the more traffic and profit you get.

The core differences between Google Ads Search and SEO come down to display position, timing, and investment cost. Here are the details:

With Google Ads Search: Your results appear immediately in the top positions. However, you pay for every click from a user. Google ad results show up in the first 3-4 positions or the last 2-3 positions on the search page, and are marked with the word “Ad.”

With SEO: To “hit the TOP,” you need to invest a lot of time and effort in building a website and content that is high-quality and useful to users. However, you do not pay Google every time someone clicks on a search result. Organic search results (or SEO results) appear “naturally” among the ad results.

Comparing SEO and Google AdWords

SEO vs. Google AdWords Comparison Table

Comparison Factor	SEO	Google AdWords
Search Channel	Applies to all search engines.	Available on Google’s websites and on sites that use Google AdSense.
Cost per Visit	Traffic from SEO is free.	Traffic from AdWords is paid.
Effort	You have to work much harder to earn one of the top positions in the organic search results.	AdWords ads appear at the top and on the right side of Google Search, and under certain conditions (a competitive auction), you can win one of the ad positions.
Time to Reach the Top of Google	– You need much more time (especially for new websites) to get good rankings and stable traffic. – Pushing a keyword to the top takes 2 – 6 months, depending on how competitive the keyword is.	– You appear in a TOP position immediately through the campaigns you create and start receiving traffic targeted at the goal you are advertising for. – It takes just 5 minutes for your ad to show up on the first page of search results.
Cost Measurability	Harder, because many factors change during an SEO campaign and affect costs and revenue.	Costs and revenue are easier to calculate.
Traffic Sustainability	Once you start receiving organic traffic, it keeps coming for the long term.	When you stop the campaign, traffic to your website stops too.
Number of Keywords	You need to focus on a few keywords first for the best results, then gradually expand to more keywords over time, with the expanded keywords taking less time than the first ones.	You can target many keywords at the same time.
Click Value	– Customer clicks account for about 65%. – SEO clicks have more potential → in terms of click value, SEO has the advantage.	– Customer clicks account for about 35%. – Google AdWords suffers from fake clicks (competitors clicking to push your keyword out of the top position).
Long-Term Cost	The fee you pay for an SEO service always stays fixed, even as the number of users visiting your website grows over time. In the long run, SEO is much cheaper.	You pay Google for every click, so as the number of visitors reaching your website through Google increases, the amount you pay Google rises as well. In addition, competitive keywords require high bids to reach a top position, so the cost per click fluctuates from keyword to keyword.
	Once a website is properly optimized and SEO-ready, long-tail keywords (potential keywords) and keywords on other pages of the same domain with low competition get pulled up as well.	It only affects the advertised URL, and other pages on the same domain are barely influenced.

SEO vs. Google AdWords Comparison Table

What Is SEO?

The SEO Concept

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, meaning the practice of optimizing for search engines. Using SEO helps your website become as well optimized as possible, show up easily when customers search, and climb higher in the search results. As a result, a business can reach customers more easily through keywords.

Although SEO can be done across many search engines, Google is the most widely chosen one in Vietnam. That is why many advertisers treat Google as the main search engine for SEO, and it is also how the term “Google SEO” came about.

Advantages of SEO

Depending on the specific situation and their goals, advertisers choose Google SEO as the way to promote their products or services. Below are some of the characteristics SEO brings.

(Almost) Free

SEO can help you reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of visits per month completely free of charge. With SEO, when your result appears to users and they click on it, you don’t pay a single cent. This is something entirely different from Google Ads, and it is also the reason most websites around the world love to use SEO.

In terms of long-term cost, over a period of 6 to 9 months or more, SEO is much more effective than Google Ads because you don’t pay for every click (CPC). The only cost is hiring an agency to carry out SEO and raise your website’s rankings, while maintenance fees are negligible.

Reach More Potential Customers

When you run ads through Google Ads, your return on ad spend (ROAS) focuses only on the group of keywords that generate the most conversions, representing the 2 – 5% of customers with the strongest buying needs. Meanwhile, the 95 – 98% of potential customers (who don’t need to buy right away) are left behind. Advertising to that group as well would eat up a huge share of your ad budget, and it would be hard to make a profit in the end.

With SEO, however, it’s different: since you don’t pay CPC, you can expand your reach to potential customers by a great deal. In the long run, SEO costs less and lets you reach more customers.

SEO Traffic Converts Better

When users visit a website through organic search results (SEO), they place more trust in the results they find and in the brand’s credibility than they do with ad results. That is why the conversion rate from SEO is higher than from Google Ads.

SEO Investment Delivers More Sustainable Results

Your business can rise quickly with Google Ads, and of course it can fall just as quickly. When many competitors go after a similar group of products or services, advertising costs rise immediately, and at some point they will exceed the profit you earn. The moment you stop spending money on ads, your product or service disappears from the search results.

SEO is hard to climb, so it is also fairly hard to fall. To rank at the top for many keywords, you need a website that is both technically sound and optimized for users. You also need to invest heavily in content and time so that Google judges your website to be trustworthy for users. Because of these difficulties, there are fewer competitors in SEO than in advertising.

Disadvantages of SEO

It Takes a Long Time to Rank Well

Creating quality SEO takes a great deal of time and effort, along with a few tricks to help your website reach the top quickly. SEO projects usually take about 6 – 12 months to deliver the best results.

It Takes Even Longer to See Revenue from SEO

Revenue from SEO is almost zero while the work is underway. However, everything changes once your website ranks well for many keywords. This is the main reason many businesses don’t want to invest in SEO. If you are wondering whether to do SEO or run Google ads, the safe move is to try Google advertising first to test the waters. Or you can use both methods in parallel so you don’t lose too much revenue.

Google’s Algorithms

The huge benefits of SEO make advertisers look for every way to reach the top in the shortest possible time. This causes Google’s search results to lose their quality. To solve this problem, Google keeps updating algorithms that remove search results that aren’t useful to users.

Any advertiser who violates these algorithms will be penalized. A minor violation gets your rankings pushed down by Google, while a serious violation gets you removed from the search results permanently. To avoid a bad outcome, you should research and choose a reputable agency that complies with Google’s policies to work with.

Here are some questions you can ask an agency if you doubt how reputable they are:

• Which SEO projects have you done, and who were the clients?
• Show us the results you achieved. Have those results lasted? What is the real-world proof?
• What is your SEO plan? What does your SEO roadmap look like? Which methods will you use to bring the website to the TOP? (Companies that rely on tricks to do SEO usually have no clear plan and use banned methods such as backlinks, copying, or rewriting content from other websites…)

What Is AdWords?

The Concept of Google Advertising

In basic terms, Google AdWords is a form of advertising that displays a link to a business’s website in the search results for keywords related to what users are searching for. To make this easy, advertisers pay Google and their keyword appears right after. Fast, simple, easy to run, and flexible to manage: these are the qualities advertisers love most.

Advantages of Google Ads Search

Delivers Fast Results

With Google Ads, you simply create an ad campaign and add funds to your Google Ads account, and you get priority placement in front of thousands of potential customers. When you execute this advertising well, you get conversions and revenue right away.

In addition, Google is now applying Machine Learning technology to support advertisers. Thanks to this, as you monitor and control your account reports, you can easily learn how to optimize costs and improve conversion performance to win even more potential customers.

Build Brand Awareness

With Google advertising, you only pay each time someone clicks. So even when users don’t click on your ad, they can still see it and remember your product or service, and it costs you nothing.

Remarketing to People Who Have Visited Your Website

An extremely useful tool Google offers advertisers is the ability to remarket to people who have visited your website before. This lets you reach again the customers who browsed your products or services earlier. It is also a point that sets SEO and Google AdWords apart.

Easy Ad Performance Measurement

Google has now developed an extremely detailed system for controlling, measuring, and optimizing ads. The prerequisite is that you set up “conversions” correctly on your website. From there, you will know clearly whether each click on your ad is profitable, how much revenue it brings in… and which keyword or ad creative performs best.

Disadvantages of Google Ads Search

Complex and Demands Strong Expertise

To set up a Google Ads campaign and get decent results, a little basic knowledge is enough to get started easily. However, this won’t last in the long run unless you build your expertise to compete and improve performance sustainably.

Very High Competition

The Google Ads market is extremely competitive in almost every industry, since every business knows about this form of advertising, and the technology age (the so-called 4.0 era) has led more people to choose online advertising. To win and own your keywords, you need a sound strategy, sufficient resources, and time to optimize in this battle.

Over the Long Term, Google Ads Costs Are Generally Very High

To hold your position in Google’s search results, you have to keep spending on ads continuously. The moment you stop paying, your ads stop appearing immediately and competitors take all your customers. This differs from SEO results, which don’t disappear when you stop spending, and it is another point that helps customers tell Google AdWords and SEO apart.

Limitations From Google’s Policies

Google currently restricts or bans advertising for certain products such as alcohol, beer, tobacco, 18+ products, and third-party services (repairs, printer ink refills…)

So Which Should You Choose: SEO or Google AdWords? Or Both?

When You Use Only SEO or Only Google AdWords

Not every business has the resources to run both channels. If you can only choose one of the two, consider your situation and the goals your business is aiming for.

If you need fast traffic in a short time, Google Ads will be very effective. Conversely, if you want to grow in a “slow but steady” way, SEO is for you.

SEO takes time and long-term upkeep, making it suitable for a long-term strategy. Meanwhile, to respond quickly to a promotion or a short-term strategy, AdWords is the flexible choice for you.

When You Use Both SEO and Google AdWords

Although some argue that once you have SEO traffic you don’t need AdWords, many real cases show that combining the two helps you reach a more diverse range of customers. When combined the right way, SEO and Google AdWords together bring tremendous benefits, specifically:

• Using keywords and data from Google Ads helps optimize SEO and strengthen brand awareness.
• You can use Google Ads to drive traffic for keywords where SEO is not performing well.
• Google Ads delivers instant results, while SEO ensures long-term, stable growth.
• This combination also enables effective remarketing, and helps you make smarter marketing decisions based on data gathered from both channels.

Answering Your Questions About SEO and Google Ads

Question 1: Should You Use SEO and Google AdWords for a New Website?

After designing a website, if you don’t invest in SEO right away, the website will lack quality, which affects how Google evaluates it. If you decide to focus on SEO at a later stage, fixing the errors and waiting for Google to update can take more effort and time than it would have at the start.

You should optimize your website to a certain level from the beginning so it can rank at the top for keywords. Then, run AdWords to generate the website’s first traffic and take advantage of both strategies.

Question 2: How Do You Get Results From SEO and Google AdWords?

Many people have made the mistake of using the homepage for an AdWords campaign or choosing keywords that are too generic in their SEO strategy.

Remember, a Google user clicking on your link does not mean they will contact you.

So after attracting traffic from both SEO and ads, the next step is to put a tight marketing strategy in place. The goal is to motivate customers to take a conversion action so you can increase revenue, which is how you get more out of SEO and Google Ads.

Question 3: For the Best Marketing Results, Should You Choose SEO or Google AdWords?

You should apply both strategies, because AdWords and SEO each bring many benefits in marketing. Investing in AdWords gives you a head start by generating traffic immediately.

Alongside an AdWords campaign, developing an SEO strategy is essential. SEO is a long-term strategy that brings sustainability and lasting results for your business.

In this article, The7 has shown you what SEO advertising is and pointed out the differences between SEO and Google Ads, as well as analyzing the pros and cons of each. Depending on your advertising goals, budget, and the level of performance you want, you can choose the right form of advertising and no longer wonder whether to pick SEO or Google AdWords.

>>> See more: Notable Google Ads trends in 2024