Is paid traffic a good substitute for SEO?

Paid traffic, if done correctly, can be a great source of income for a new business provided you are certain that your landing pages are properly optimized for conversions and that you understand how keyword bidding works.

Online advertising costs have a tendency to pile up quickly and the returns can be low without the right strategy in place. With that said, paid advertising can also bring highly targeted traffic to your website or eCommerce store and result in sales and revenue, and hopefully long term customers.

Content and SEO on the other hand take a little bit longer to generate returns. Social media makes it more likely that a unique and interesting bit of content can generate huge volumes of traffic overnight, making the potential for overnight rewards a possibility.

More often than not, SEO and content will take a few months and a lot of man-hours to get right. However, a consistent and persistent content publication and SEO campaign will, in the end, pay long term dividends.

It may be better to invest money into creating great content that starts driving more and more traffic over time because this gives you time to improve landing page designs as you learn more about how visitors react to your site.

Diving straight into paid advertising can be a costly way to discover design flaws, cart abandonment issues, high bounce rate, poor performance, and other issues that might lead to low conversion rates.

While it is incredibly important to generate a flow of revenue as early as possible, I would focus on creating content and building social influence first. Once you are certain your site is converting efficiently, and organic search traffic volumes are building, it may be time to experiment with paid ads and traffic.