Optimising for search will create organic traffic - this is 'owed media' - the benefits ow owned media are that it's always there so long as you keep optimising.  But a high ranking page can generate lots of revenue on autopilot for many months and years for just a couple of days research and writing time.  The downsides of this is that you have to be a real expert in your field or have done so much research that you can write like one and know how to optimise to get the high rankings that will generate the traffic and revenue.

Organic is not immediate.  It might take a month to get your domain authority up to a reasonable level through link-building and then each page might take a week or month to get onto page one and then after a bit of tweaking to position 1-3 (where the money's at.)

Paid is different - it's immediate.  You don't own it you pay for it.  It's someone else's system (ad words or Facebook) and you're buying their advertising space.  The benefits of this is it can yield instant returns and is extremely flexible so you can run flash sales and offers etc.

There is a huge amount of research to suggest that the long term benefits and ROI or ROE or ROMS (or whichever metric you go for), of organic far outweigh those of paid.  Because when you turn off paid media it's gone.  Whereas you can't turn off organic, it's evergreen and the traffic just keeps coming.

If your questions is more about which keywords to use, traffic ones or money ones then this depends on how your site operates.  But always have money in mind if you're running a business or helping someone else with theirs for a fee.  The highest bid PPC keywords are clearly the ones that are going to generate more conversions and money.  Because the huge google marketplace has decided that for you in a billion ways. So if it's a service business and there are people bidding on '[service] cost' then write an article about cost, price comparisons or what people are actually paying for inside the product (is it research (pharma) or the actual materials (jewellery) or the skill of the creator (art) - so that you rank for cost/price.  Or even just put the cost on there. This is something lots of B2B companies don't do - and it's a conversion killer.  People want to know how much something costs.  Like at least a ballpark figure.

Or if you make your money with the ads network then go you may wish to go after the high traffic keywords and get the traffic so that you get paid more per ad impression. I like to go for both traffic and money.  Why limit yourself to one or the other?  And with traffic comes authority and lots of other benefits, you may find that a bigger site with more traffic is like a snowball and starts attracting links so you can rank better for the money terms too.

But start small. Everything starts from nothing.  And there'll be niche keywords with moderate traffic and low competition and commercial intent that you can rank for to kick things off.

That's a difficult question because it's not 100% clear whether you're asking about paid vs organic or traffic keywords vs commercial intent ones.

Hope this essay helps though. Feel free to ask again if i've misunderstood.

Nicholas is correct. Brackets, (r) symbols (TM) and full stops, Pipes (like these) | and commas don't affect SEO. I have extensively tested my titles in the SERPS for CTR and found that using Pipes as delimiters is higher converting than full stops or commas. But it all depends on what looks nice. For example, we have a great number one positions with the following titles: Remarkable Braces Liverpool | From £46.50pcm | Free Whitening It's the stars that draw attention to the free whitening with your braces Veneers Cost in 2018 | Veneers Price Comparison by Cosmetic Dentists This used to be 2017 and I recently updated it to 2018, Google loves dates because users want up to date information. Don't just update the date though without making actual additions and changes to the page though. This is possibly going to negatively affect things. Smileworks Liverpool | Affordable Private Dentist Liverpool Simple pipe looks clean and emphasises our affordability. 6 Month Smiles Liverpool | Unbiased Reviews & Price Comparison Comparisons of price is a great title to use and the & symbol is fine here so it doesn't go over the word limit for a title tag Fastbraces Liverpool | Orthodontist Q&A, safety, prices and reviews Q&A is fine here too. If you google a term you can see whether google considers it to mean the same thing by it beingf shown in bold in the meta descriptions in other results. So for example 6 month smiles is the same in the eyes of google as six-month-smiles and compound hyphens, brackets and all that good stuff will only serve to emphasise and increase CTR which is huge. Get testing. It takes a couple of days for a title tag to change but you can get meaningful data from search console for your click through rates (CTR) Be creative! There is a John Mueller Q&A on the topic and that's where I learned that google doesn't care or it takes these things into account if you use them naturally and in a way that is nice to look at in the SERP or that stands out. Hope this helps Good luck testing.

Of Course! EGOL this is another extremely solid piece of advice.  I'm wishing I worked for a charity now. EVERYONE will want to publicise their giving so make sure that rather than them writing up their good work on their blog that you go over and take photos and write up the story and have that on your blog to say thanks to the business for their generous support.  They will 100% want to link to it.

You need to create the content on your site though for maximum effect.  It will not always get a link but it's a solid strategy because content is loved by google anyway.

EGOL can you confirm the position with linking in return for links.  I read somewhere at Google that it was a problem if someone links to you and you link back to them.  Because Google thinks you're just 'swapping links' and trying to game the system.  So be careful that not every inbound link has another link from you back to it because you may fall foul of a sort of algorithmic penalty.

Someone else will have to confirm this is correct though as I'm not 100% sure.

I would ignore what other people are doing.  The charity sector is not always known for it's super-efficient and industry leading digital marketing activities.  So although the advice that John Mondt gives is sound for many industries, he is right to include the phrase 'what's working' for them.  So don't just copy their link profile or go after links before carefully analysing them for quality and their potential to be relevant in the future.  I work in Dentistry and copying other dentists link profiles is more likely to land me with a penalty than take my DA anywhere special.

Charities tend to be filled with people (at the senior levels) who have pretty impressive backgrounds and CV's.  Also you're in a very strong position because charities are good for the world so no matter who you contact, you're always going to be coming from a place of positivity and wanting to make the world a better place.  This is huge.  So I would round up everyone at your charity on the board who belongs to any university, trusted organisation, professional body or other trusted domains and reach out to them for guest posting ideas and shameless plugs of your organisation.

Link building for a non for profit is about just putting together a great pitch about how you're helping the world and then asking for help to spread the word.  Don't be afraid to be totally authentic and honest about wanting to improve the visibility of your website (short of asking for links which is against the guidelines)

Hope this helps.  But I was looking at a big charity just now and there are CBE's on the board, people with honorary degrees from universities and people who are members of huge and trusted organisations.  So as a linkbuilder, i'd reach out to those people and put together a strategy of how to leverage those relationships to gain links.  Or in this case 'do PR' as white hat linkbuilding and PR are now pretty much synonymous. (used to say not synonymous, sorry, PR and linkbuilding are the same - that's a typo)

hope this helps.  PS: I love helping charities so maybe hit me up and I could help you in more detail. Obviously i'm not going to charge you but a mention from a charity website is always a great thing for us.  We just did a huge campaign for international women's day that bumped our DA three clear points.  Win!

"The only benefit is trust , increase CTR etc and obviously reviews markup."

This is a huge benefit though.  It's abut users at the end of the day and having those stars showing in the serps and having the reviews scrolling on your site (using a widget) has helped me enormously with CTR.  It's one of those where you need to think less about the technical SEO stuff and more about how having the reviews there will increase the CTR and conversion rates.  It also helps time on site - all MASSIVE ranking signals.

If I said to you that a piece of technical wizzardry could increase CTR, TOS and conversions then you'd learn how to do it and implement it like immediately.  Well that's what reviews do.  So i'd not worry about marking them up or just use a wordpress widget and get them on there. I'm not massively technical but we do have 500 5* reviews with a widget on every page of the site and are in the top 3 for most non-branded searches because of our CTR. Also google says they want to eventually live in a world without markup when the algo gets smarter so it's all going to be a moot point.

Sorry If i've missed the technical nuances of this but we're doing super well just having the nice comments up there on the site (which is more than lots of your competitors have)

I'm a local dentist and have the same problem.  So we have 188 x 5 star reviews.  They are appearing next to every blog post I write and every services page but not the homepage.  Having those yellow stars in the serps and on the map is HUGE and tyou can get them just not for the homepage.

If you're on wordpress theres a plugin called Google reviews for business that works really well for us. So all your team pages, about pages, blogs and menus can have the stars - just not your homepage. So you could create individual pages for each dish or meal if you like and have stars next to them. So as a dentist I have a braces services page, an Implants one, a cosmetic one and a whitening one, all with reviews in the map, on the page as a slider and in the blogs.

So don't be defeated, you can do it really easily with the plugin!

OMG sitebulb is epic.  There actually is an app for everything in the entire universe. Great call David, thanks.

Yep, screaming frog SEO spider is great to get the data into excel.  However, it's not great for visualising it.  I'd go low-tech and use Word or a pen and pad!

It's all about topics so write all your main topics out in bubbles with a little cloud of subtopics around them and draw lines from the ones that are relevant to each other.  Like when you're planning an essay at at school. It really is that simple.

Keep it simple!

Hope this helps.

Ed.