Many clients are aware that, when it comes to search engine marketing, there are two basic approaches to getting web traffic. The first, of course, is to go after traffic by optimizing your site for organic search. This  involves the variety of tasks and time needed to get your website to show up in one of the first results of the main body of a Google search results page.

The second is paid search, the most common of which is Google Adwords. Paid search allows you to instantly show up on the first page of a search engine results page by buying your way to the top. The difference between the two is that, with organic search, you’re spending time and resources upfront for a long term payback. In other words, it might take weeks or months to see results in an organic-based optimization effort. Adwords, however, allows you to instantly dominate the search engines but, unlike organic search results, the Adwords customer pays for every click. Interesting marketing opportunities often come when the two approaches are integrated, which leads us to today’s Novice SEO Tip of the Day.

Organic search efforts are premised on optimizing a website’s pages for certain keywords. If you’ve read our previous posts, you probably understand that these keywords should be based on research efforts at the outset. However, a liability of organic search campaigns is that they often take months to bear fruit. What happens if you spend all those months waiting and tweaking, only to discover that the keywords you’ve optimized your site’s pages for don’t actually bring in business? It’s entirely possible, for instance, to pull traffic to a site, without actually increasing revenues at all.

Just because a keyword increasese traffice doesn’t mean it will result in increased clients or sales. One way to test out keywords quickly, at the outset of a campaign, is to do a quick Adwords buy of the keywords you’re considering. But some keywords, test them for a week or two and you can test out, more or less in “real time” whether your assumed keywords are likely to pull their weight and deliver actual ROI!