Adwords and SEO are the main components of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and are among your most valuable tools when running digital marketing campaigns. They have differences and similarities and there are situations that you should use them together or separately depending on your business and marketing goals.

What is Google AdWords?
If you are new to digital marketing, you may have heard people talking about PPC and Adwords and things like CPC, bids and campaigns may remind you of something but you are not sure of what. Let me explain.
Google Adwords is an advertising platform owned by Google. Advertisers can use this platform to position their ads in the Google Search Result pages, Google Products (YouTube, Gmail etc) and to thousands of other websites that participate in the AdWords program as publishers (that’s Google Adsense).
As advertiser you can choose to pay when someone clicks on your ad (Cost Per Click or CPC) or when people see your ad (CPM or Cost per Thousands Impressions). The whole Adwords system works like a big auction where advertisers compete for the available advertising places.

What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO has to do with getting better rankings in the search engine results pages of Google, Yahoo, Bing and other major search engines. In order to achieve that, you need to make sure that your website is search engine friendly.
A search engine friendly website can be ‘read’ easily by search engines and used with ease by users. You can read my SEO tips for the most important configurations you need to apply to your website to make it search engine friendly but the general idea is to have a fast and functional website with unique content that offers a good experience to the end user.

AdWords VS SEO
Now that you have a general idea of what is adwords and SEO let’s see how they compare:
Adwords is for Google sites and websites that use Google Adsense while SEO principles are applicable for all search engines.
Adwords traffic is paid while SEO traffic is free (this is the believe in the industry but I will explain in another post why it is not exactly true)
Adwords ads appear on the top and right of Google Search and under certain conditions you can get one of those ad positions but with SEO you have to work much harder to get one of the top positions in the organic search results.
Adwords is more immediate than SEO since you can create advertising campaigns almost instantly and start getting targeted traffic while with SEO you need a lot more time (especially for new websites) to get good rankings and traffic.
With Adwords is easier to calculate the ROI while with SEO is more difficult because there are a lot more factors that play a role and not just spending and revenue.
When you stop your adwords campaigns traffic also stops but once you start getting organic traffic with SEO this will continue long term.
With Adwords you can target many keywords at the same time while with SEO you need to focus on a few keywords for best results.
With Adwords you can advertise on other Google websites and websites that use Google Adsense but the results from SEO are only for the search results pages.
You can also read my previous article: What is the difference between SEO and PPC for more examples on how these two tools differ.

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