SEO, when done right, is essential in establishing your brand presence and driving traffic to your site organically. Is it being undermined by your paid media strategy?
Sometimes, that’s the case. If you’re paying for your presence to be prioritized in Google or Amazon search, you risk discounting the efforts that have gone into making sure your SEO is firing on all cylinders. That’s because when users see your brand in a paid ad spot, they may write you off as a pay-to-play. At the least, buying ads on your brand terms, and investing in your SEO, is doubling up resources to get the same result: traffic to your site.
There’s a better and smarter way to get your SEO strategy and your paid media work together.
The Power of Incremental Testing
Let’s get one thing straight first: incremental testing as a strategy isn’t for everyone. If your brand is playing in a highly competitive space, when other brands are ready and willing to buy your search terms for paid ads if you don’t steer clear.
If that’s not the case, try it out. With incremental testing, you reduce or eliminate all spend on paid search and reinvest those resources elsewhere. Does SEO do the trick in driving the same amount of traffic? Are sales rising, or are you losing money? You’re likely to use some traffic, but it may not be a significant enough change to warrant the spend on paid search that can go elsewhere. Typically, in our work with clients, we’ve seen them retain between 70-90% of their search traffic – a high clickthrough, low cost-per-click metric for brand marketers. When marketing spend can be allocated elsewhere, in more incremental strategies, that’s a win for brands.
Establishing Good SEO Practices
Incremental testing – and potentially siphoning spend away from paid media – relies on a healthy baseline and history of good SEO practices.
A good site structure that’s easy to navigate and a variety of relevant content are key to strong SEO. Are users clicking around on the site or bouncing out immediately? The site should feel full and alive, informative and efficient. Articles and case studies – especially those that answer questions that customers searching around on Google might have – help drive awareness, while testimonials, product guides, clear pricing information and demos help secure the sale. All of this together can lead to higher conversion rates and lower costs per click.
Where Paid Comes In
This isn’t to say that paid media is the enemy of organic search discovery. It can actually do a lot of legwork in shaping the organic strategy, thanks to insights you get from paid.
Pay attention to what keywords are performing on the paid side, and use that to shape your organic content. Over time, you can transition your site’s content to purely organic, but using the learnings from a paid media strategy to prioritize the right search terms, consumer challenges, points of interest, and more. This also works in the reverse: Is a search term or keyword you thought would be a big traffic driver not lighting up in paid? That’s a sign priorities should be readjusted.
Once you’ve gleaned enough from paid media analytics, you can feel more confident turning off paid and focusing on organic without feeling like you’re working in the dark.
On The Horizon
Google’s ad product strategy has changed so much, it’s gotten more difficult to work around its machine and play organic SEO and paid media off of each other.
Cost-per-click rates have increased over the years as Google’s forced more auctions to increase its revenue. Enter Performance Max campaigns: a new Google product that uses Google AI for performance optimization and to use the entire Google suite of ads across a single campaign. This is helpful in increasing conversion value, because of the sheer volume of ad products deployed at once. But as of now, it’s still a black box, hard to differentiate why something’s working and why something may not be. And it will also cost more.
But even as Google is experimenting with AI tools for advertisers, it’s not a good idea to go all-in on AI. AI can augment your brand’s bandwidth, for example, or play a more experimental role in lower-stakes campaigns. But human touch and authenticity is still necessary to get the right balance. AI can’t pass off expert-level content, so don’t try to force it to. It’s a tool, not a standalone function.
What’s also clear is that Google is going to keep experimenting and changing its ad strategy. Knowing where you can appear organically, and how, and when to invest is paramount. Don’t be caught in the dark.