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SEO agency vs FB ads agency - Which brings in better conversions?

If you have the budget, we recommend hiring both an SEO agency and FB ads agency because they complement each other perfectly.

SEO agencies take care of organic, long-term traffic and conversions by publishing top and bottom-of-the-funnel articles. While you’re waiting for Google to rank these articles, the FB ads agency will drive quick traffic, getting those early wins.

In the guide below, we wanted to compare the benefits of hiring an SEO agency vs FB ads agency. But keep in mind that even though we’re an SEO agency, we don’t believe one is better than the other.

Note: At SaaSpirin, our goal is to get your website from zero to 10K monthly traffic within the next 12 months. We also report on product sign-ups, with many of our clients seeing conversions within 1.5 months. So if you’d like to see what we can do for your website, book a call with our founder and we’ll send you a free 12-month traffic projection.

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Why do good SEO agencies generate better mid to long-term conversions?

Here are a couple of reasons why we believe SEO agencies can generate better mid to long-term conversions than a FB ads agency:

  • SEO attracts people actively searching for your product
  • SEO compounds over time
  • SEO is cheaper in the long run

SEO attracts people actively searching for your product

The major benefit of hiring an SEO agency is that they’ll bring in people who’re actively searching for your product. This shows high buying intent which ultimately leads to higher conversion rates.

Think about it: If you sell construction software for example and you rank for the keyword "best construction software," there's a high likelihood that readers who click on your article will buy your software. They literally just typed "best construction software" into Google.

Compare this to a FB ads agency, where they’ll run FB ads that pop up as users scroll through their news feed. Sure, you can personalize your ads and only show them to people who're part of construction Facebook groups, for example, but it doesn't mean that these users are ready to buy construction software. There’s little buying intent.

SEO compounds over time

Another benefit of hiring an SEO agency is that your SEO efforts compound over time when done correctly. 

Think of SEO as compound interest. It takes a while to build up, but when it does, your results snowball.

SEO’s compounding effect works like this: When you first publish your article, it ranks on the sixth or seventh page and almost nobody clicks on it.

However, Google begins testing to see how readers will interact with your article. So it puts your article on the second or third page for a couple of days and drives a few page views to it. 

If Google thinks you're fulfilling searcher’s intent, maybe because searchers stay on your article for a couple minutes longer than the competitor’s articles, it starts pushing it higher up the rankings.

As you rank higher, you bring in more high-intent traffic and the process snowballs.

When you eventually rank in the top three positions, you receive over 50 percent of all clicks, effectively giving you a monopoly over the traffic for that keyword (given you continue fulfilling searcher’s intent).

This is a drawback of FB ads agencies. Your conversions dry up as soon as you stop working with the agency, so you constantly have to dedicate marketing budget to Facebook Ads.

SEO is cheaper in the long run

The last major benefit of SEO agencies we want to discuss is that they're much cheaper in the long run. Sure, in the first couple of months, you might not generate organic conversions.

However, as your articles start ranking higher and bringing in more visitors who’re ready to buy your product, you begin making your money back. After a year or two, you can easily make back 3x or more on the monthly retainer you paid your SEO agency.

Many of the articles we published for our clients in 2020 are still getting consistent conversions, even though we no longer work with them and they aren't paying monthly retainers anymore.

With FB ads agencies, you won't be able to generate conversions if you can’t dedicate marketing budget every month and this works out more expensive in the long run.

Why should you hire a FB ads agency?

Even though we're an SEO agency, we see the value in hiring a FB ads agency. In fact, we recommend our clients hire a FB ads agency and run ads to our bottom-of-the-funnel articles in order to see quicker results.

Here are some reasons why we recommend running Facebook Ads while building out an SEO campaign:

  • You can generate conversions quicker
  • It’s cheaper in the short-term
  • You can micro-target your audience

You can generate conversions quicker

Because Facebook Ads allow you to reach out to a massive audience within a short period of time, it makes it easier to generate conversions quickly. We’ve seen clients run Facebook ads and generate 1,000 clicks a couple of days after we published an article.

If you were to publish a bottom-of-the-funnel article and wait for Google to rank it, you might have to wait three months or more, which is a problem if you need customers immediately.

It’s cheaper in the short-term

Hiring a FB ads agency can sometimes be cheaper than hiring an SEO agency, making it a good option for smaller businesses and startups.

While SEO agencies will charge a fixed monthly retainer fee ranging from $2,000 to $10,000 per month, FB ads agencies tend to be more flexible. Many FB ads agencies will simply take a percentage of your monthly ad budget, around 10 to 20 percent.

This flexibility means you can spend as little as $500 per month on Facebook Ads. When sales start picking up, you can increase this number to however much your marketing budget allows.

You can micro-target your audience

Although Facebook can’t target users based on what keyword they searched for, it makes up for this with its specific targeting features.

For example, if you sell construction software, a FB ads agency can choose to only show your ads to people who are part of certain construction groups on Facebook.

And if you find that the people who buy your software own construction companies and are typically over the age of 40, you can add this filter to your ads, i.e. only show ads to people who are part of construction Facebook groups and are over 40 years old.

These are all the factors you can use to narrow your target audience down with:

  • Demographic data like age, gender, location, employment, etc.
  • Psychographic data like interests, beliefs, and attitudes
  • Behavioral data like purchase history and post engagement

You can even use FB ad agencies to only target people who previously interacted with your brand, so you're showing your ads to warm leads. This is a good idea for small businesses with limited budgets, as these campaigns see better conversion rates than ones reaching out to cold audiences.

Take your website from zero to 10K monthly visitors

As an SEO agency, our main goal is to get your website to 10K monthly visitors within the next 12 months. If you’re interested in learning how we do this, book a discovery call and we'll walk you through our SEO approach:

  • Run keyword gap analysis: We use keyword gap analysis to find keywords that your competitors are ranking for and you aren’t. These include both high-volume keywords that're going to get you to 10K monthly visitors as well as high-intent keywords that’ll bring in those product sign-ups.
  • Write in-depth product-based articles: Once we’ve identified keywords with high conversion and traffic potential, we’ll write product-based articles that show readers how your product solves their pain points better than the competition. The way we do this is by interviewing you and getting an understanding of your customer’s pain points and the features that your product has that solve these pain points.
  • Track conversions inside Google Analytics: To understand which articles are bringing in the most conversions, we’ll set up conversion tracking inside Google Analytics.
  • Build backlinks to high-converting websites: Once we know which articles convert best, we’ll use our connections inside the SaaS industry to build backlinks to these articles. The idea behind this is that as we build backlinks to these pieces and rank higher, we’ll generate more high-intent traffic and, thus, more conversions.

If you’re interested in learning more about our approach, book a quick call with our founder.