Organic vs. Paid: What Should a Local Business Invest In First?

This is one of the most common questions asked by local business owners: should the first marketing dollar be invested in SEO or in paid ads? The real answer is that they are completely different beasts which provide different value on different timelines.

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With organic search the value compounds it takes some time and effort to get on the first page of Google but once you do the traffic and leads will continue to come at a much lower cost per lead.

In most cases the optimal approach is to have both in your marketing mix while you spend on this approach to get visibility faster you can use the same audience insights to inform your long term growth and eventually reduce the CPL (cost per lead) of your paid campaigns as you start ranking for more keywords.

This is especially true in competitive local markets a well-managed google ads montreal campaign will get you in front of the most receptive audience for your marketing budget and you can use that same insight to inform your seo company montreal efforts to eventually rank organically for those same keywords.

Most local marketers make the mistake of thinking of those two budgets (paid and organic) as separate when they should be viewed as a system. If you have some organic visibility but it is still too early to get in front of a big audience consider working with a seo company montreal to ensure that your SEO and Google Ads spend are working in tandem.

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