When I first started doing foreign trade promotion, I often had a difficult choice between SEO and paid advertising. For me at the time, it was too difficult to make a choice.
I found that I am not the only one who has this confusion, and many friends around me also don’t know how to choose, so I did a serious research, combined with my marketing experience in the past few years, and real cases of friends around me, to answer this question.
How to choose between SEO and paid advertising? The answer is: depends on your specific situation. SEO and paid advertising have their own advantages and disadvantages. If you choose SEO, you will get free and long-term stable traffic in the future, but correspondingly, you have to be prepared for a protracted battle. SEO usually takes 9 months to 1 year to see results time.
If you choose paid advertising, you can get traffic as soon as your website is online, but you must be prepared to pay for it for a long time. Depending on the industry, it is very common to spend 5,000 to 10,000 dollar a month.
If you are in a hurry to get an answer, the above passage can help you make a judgment. If you want to know more about SEO and paid advertising, you can continue to read. In this article, I will discuss this topic with you from the following angles:
The benefits of SEO
Maybe you still don’t know what SEO is, you might as well read an article I posted before: “Podcast | What is SEO?” “ To put it simply, SEO can make your website rank high on the Google search page. Once a customer searches for keywords in your industry, he may enter your website.
Let’s talk about the benefits of SEO first. The biggest advantage of SEO is that Google will continuously and steadily deliver traffic to your website. Over time, as long as you keep producing high-quality content that is helpful to customers, you will Get more and more traffic like a snowball.
Here is a screenshot of one of my blogging sites:
As of today, this website has a total of less than 200 articles, most of which are around 2,000 words, which is not a lot. Moreover, because I am too busy, I haven’t updated it for almost a year, but the number of people who visit this website every day, Still at 1,000.
Because the foreign trade website does not have a wide audience, it will definitely not reach this number, but if I can use the same strategy to achieve one-tenth, 100 potential customers visit the website every day, it will be a great success.
How much is 100 leads per day worth? If the conversion rate of 3% is calculated, there will be close to 100 inquiries in a month. Depending on the industry, the cost of an inquiry ranges from 200 to 500 dollar. After one month, it can produce 20,000 to 500 dollar million value.
The above is still the most conservative estimate. There have been breakthroughs in many places, not only this number:
- Can you achieve more than 100 unique visitors per day?
- Can the conversion rate of your page exceed 3%?
- Will the inquiry value of your industry be higher than 500 dollar?
So, if your SEO is successful, even if you do nothing for the next few years, you can still get a lot of valuable inquiries.
And in this process, not only can you see and touch inquiries and orders, but you can also gradually accumulate brands and create higher added value.
Disadvantages of SEO
What are the disadvantages of SEO? The biggest disadvantage of SEO is that the effect of SEO is relatively slow. If you want to rank in Google, you need to spend a lot of time producing content. At the same time, you have to wait for Google to verify whether your content is suitable for ranking. Google will never trust any new content easily. website.
The following is the website of an American friend of mine. It can be seen that in the past half a year, the daily traffic of this website did not exceed 50.
If it were you, are you confident to get through the “plain period” that lasted half a year? According to my observation, the main reason for the failure of the website is to give up halfway, and the other is the temptation to try black hat SEO when the traffic does not improve..
Moreover, SEO is not completely free for the vast majority of people, because you have to write high-quality English content, and it is unrealistic not to hire a writer. In “How much does it cost to recruit a writer to do SEO?” “ In this article, you can get a simple conversion formula: 1 word is equal to 2.7 cents.
If our goal is to produce 200 articles, with an average article of 2,000 words, then we need to invest a total of 10,800 US dollars, which is about 75,000 dollar.
This price is not friendly to most foreign traders. It is equivalent to opening an Alibaba store account for more than two years, but if it is successful, the 75,000 dollar does not seem to be expensive, and the cost can be recovered in a few months later.
Of course, I can’t guarantee that you will see results as long as you spend 75,000 dollar. There are many ways to do SEO, and there are many points to pay attention to. I stumbled for so many years and saw many successes and failures. Confidence says that I have a “high probability” of being able to successfully complete an SEO project.
But for the vast majority of people, the first project you want to do in your life is likely to be your last project, which is your foreign trade website. It is still difficult to succeed, just like starting an independent business.
So I hope that before you start your SEO project, you can maintain a humble attitude and absorb SEO knowledge seriously. If you learn more in the early stage, the chance of success will increase by one point.
Benefits of Paid Advertising
Maybe you don’t know about paid advertising. The so-called paid advertising means that you spend money to advertise on various platforms (such as Google, Facebook or YouTube). Through advertising, potential customers will enter your website, which will generate inquiries and orders for you .
What are the benefits of paid advertising? The biggest advantage of paid advertising is that it works quickly. Every penny you spend will bring you potential customers. The first second your website goes online, customers can enter the website and contact you.
Compared with SEO, paid advertising can achieve results faster, whether it works or not, you can tell at a glance, and if you choose paid advertising, the whole business logic is different from SEO.
Under the SEO system, what you want to pursue is continuous and stable traffic, because stable traffic means the same stable inquiries and orders. Under the premise of paid advertising, what you want to pursue is ROI (Return on Investment, investment response rate), as long as you can earn 1+x dollars by spending 1 dollar, you should continue to do it for a long time.
Let me be a little more specific, based on the formula above, if you think about it, what does it mean when your x is $0.2 over a month’s time? It means that for every dollar you spend, you can create a profit of 0.2 dollars for you.
As long as you have the money on hand, investing in any other project can’t create a profit of more than 20% in a single month, you should use all the money on hand to advertise.
Therefore, advertising is very suitable for people who want to achieve quick results and have sufficient funds at hand. It is no exaggeration to say that the traffic bought by paid advertising can be far greater than the traffic obtained by SEO.
The following is my friend Xu Dan, who is in the beauty industry, sent me his plan for this year (the full picture of the plan cannot be shown, the project has just finished research):
A completely zero project, he plans to invest 10 million in advertising! Guess how much money he intends to invest in SEO? — 900,000.
Because if you want to spend money on SEO, you can’t spend it. If you hire the top writers to write two super high-quality articles every day, the annual cost will not exceed one million, so it’s not that Xu Dan doesn’t want to work hard on Google SEO. , still no power at all…
Therefore, if you don’t want to wait half a year or even a year to see results, and you currently have sufficient cash flow on hand, and you have created a business model with positive ROI, then you should choose paid advertising without hesitation.
Disadvantages of Paid Advertising
What are the disadvantages of paid advertising? The biggest disadvantage of paid advertising is that you have to spend money continuously. If you stop paying one day, most of the traffic brought by the advertising channel will disappear.
Moreover, the key to the success of paid advertising lies in repeated optimization and sufficient budget. The more budget, the more data, the more data, the more feedback, and the more feedback, you can continue to optimize until the return on investment becomes positive. number, but most people neither understand optimization nor have enough budget to do it.
Many people around me have tried advertising, whether it is Google keyword advertising or Facebook advertising. After they tried it, they found that the money was spent and potential customers entered the website, but in the end there were not many people. Send an inquiry.
In the end they can only stop advertising and lament how unsuitable his industry is for paid advertising.
But after my observation, the biggest reasons for their failure can be summed up in two-never optimized, plus too little budget.
If you hold the belief that “if you spend money, you will definitely receive inquiries” and never optimize your entire process, I can tell you clearly that your chances of failure are very high.
If you only plan to spend 5,000 dollar to try the water, or spend 1,000 dollar a month to try it for a year, then I can tell you clearly that your chances of failure are very high.
Investing in paid advertisements is the same as doing physical experiments in junior high school. It requires a rigorous attitude and repeated optimization of the conversion rate of each link.
Throughout the process, you need to be proficient in web page creation and data analysis, and you may need to use data analysis tools (refer to my article: “Observing Customer Capillaries – A Comprehensive Guide to Lucky Orange” ) to record the customer’s screen and analyze Every visit and click by a customer.
You have to think about the meaning behind each of his actions, and then make modifications and adjustments on your ad landing page, such as changing the copy, changing the button color, modifying the banner, etc. Any small modification will affect the conversion rate of your page , which ultimately affects your ROI.
It is by no means “spending money to get things done” as you imagined. You must not hold the idea of ”I will succeed if I have money” when you invest in paid advertisements. “.
Secondly, the budget is also very important, because only if your budget is large enough, you can have enough data for optimization, just like when we were studying statistics in high school, the teacher also taught that if we want the statistical results to be accurate, the sample size must be large .
The sample size is not high, and the observed phenomena are likely to be occasional events rather than objective laws.
Once a friend asked me, Yan sir, my xxx keyword is obviously a big word in my industry. I can guarantee that the potential customers who come from this word are accurate buyers, but why is my conversion rate so low? 1%?
When I saw that the click-through rate of his keyword was less than 20, I wanted to laugh——with such a small amount of data, what correct results can be observed? All judgments made under this sample size have a high probability of being wrong.
Therefore, if you want to succeed in paid advertising, you must be fully prepared in terms of optimization and budget. This is also the biggest drawback of paying for advertising—there is a huge amount of learning, and you must be rich enough.
How would I choose?
If I run a foreign trade website from scratch, at the beginning, I will do SEO while placing advertisements, and use the data obtained from advertising to continuously optimize my website, so that customers will come in the first second when the website goes online .
After the “plain period” has passed and there is stable and free traffic every day, I will stop the advertisements and let the website run fully automatically. I will focus more on the company’s SOP optimization and maintenance of major customers.
There is a reason for doing this. On the one hand, doing SEO from the very beginning can ensure that I can pass through the “plain period” as soon as possible. If I do SEO only half a year after my website goes online, the result will be delayed for half a year.
On the other hand, advertising in the “plain period” is very scientific. I can not only ensure that the project can receive inquiries, but also use the advertising data to further optimize my website and increase the conversion rate.
Maybe you can see it… I prefer to use SEO to do projects, which is also related to what I am doing now.
Because SEO can bring me passive income, as long as I research what I am interested in, and write the results of the research into useful content for others, I can get rewarded for it-there are better ways to make money than this ? SEO is the real “realization of interest”.
But for advertising, I still lack the experience of “money”, although I have helped Mi KeSuch a giant has pitched in advertisements and knows all the details and gameplay in the middle, but compared with the really awesome people, I still have a lot of room for improvement.
I have seen a lot of friends who do well, and they spend millions of dollars on advertising in a single month. Paid advertising is like running a marathon—if you want to run fast, you need to train enough at ordinary times. Be big.
If you run 300 kilometers a month and more than 3,000 kilometers a year, don’t think about it, your marathon performance can’t be bad.
The same is true for advertising. If you can spend millions every month and have enough data for optimization, then you are a super player in this field.
The article is almost here. If you want to know more about SEO, I wrote an article before, which specifically talked about how to quickly get Google rankings: ” From Google Officials: 3 Major Factors That Affect Rankings Most” .
If you want to learn more about paid advertising, I have recorded a set of free courses on the Mikequan APP: “Using Google Violence to Make Orders”(APP needs to be downloaded), it will definitely help you.
