This is a question that business owners have to deal with when they are thinking about an SEO strategy. In order to know which one you should go with it is important to understand the difference between organic traffic and paid traffic. Organic traffic is the kind that you generate by actually doing SEO. You will be doing things like using the right keywords, making sure that you have long tail keywords, getting backlinks to the right websites, getting your content right and so on.

Paid traffic, on the other hand, is the kind that you get by placing ads. This kind of traffic was there before organic traffic. It requires that website owners buy ads from search engines such as Google who then place them on sites that they think are relevant. Each time an ad is clicked on the user is led back to the website of the one who paid for it and that is considered a lead. There are a couple of problems with paid traffic. The first is that over the years users have become inundated with ads and many will not bother with them. The second is that it can be quite expensive – it makes it impossible for small businesses to be on a level playing field with bigger ones that have bigger marketing budgets.

If you want to improve your chances of online success you should be focused on getting organic traffic for several reasons: it is free, search engines like it so they reward you with ranking, it has long term benefits and it is driven by the kind of content that you put online.

One way you can get ahead of your competition when it comes to generating organic traffic is through the use of long tail keywords. These are phrases that are longer than ordinary keywords because they are more descriptive. If, for instance, you want users to find your website more easily instead of using simply the keywords “Arizona SEO” you can instead use “Flagstaff area SEO agency”. This way, because your SEO business is located in Flagstaff then when people search for you locally they will find you much faster than the website that has the shorter keywords.

There is another benefit to using long tail keywords. Not only are users more likely to find your website faster, they are also more likely to buy from you because they typed in very specific search terms and got exactly what they were looking for. In effect, you are getting more leads as well as more conversions. It is also important to mention that the use of long tail keywords helps generate content that will help your website rank better.

To conclude, you are much better generating organic traffic than paid traffic – it pays on all fronts.