When is comes to paid ads, most people figure that they can just pay whatever they need to pay and then their website will appear right above their competition on the Google results page. After paying for the ad, many webmasters think their work is done, and they’ll have a high amount of traffic to their site for the rest of their days, which is simply not true. So the question remains, do you need to have better content than your competitors, or just a bigger wallet?
The answer to this question is no, success is never guaranteed, but having a big budget certainly helps give your site an edge. Creating high quality content and gaining credible backlinks are more integral to gaining a consistent traffic flow to your site. Paid ads are a great way to get someone to visit your site, but quality content is what gets them to stay, and maybe even come back later. When a site is constantly updated with quality content, it is likely to get backlinks from people that claim it is a credible source, which help to build the site’s audience. One excellent point that John Gagnon mentions has to do with the number of clicks severely diminishes below the top 3 results, and paid ads are always the ones that appear above the fold in those positions. Overall, paid ads are a great way to help generate traffic and gain a better position on the SERP, but it is more important to create quality content that keeps people on your site.