The Myth of SEO vs. Google Ads
We often hear from clients who believe it’s one or the other; SEO or paid ads (usually Google Ads). It’s easy to understand why; doing one thing wholeheartedly gets better results than two things half-heartedly. Putting all your budget into one form of digital marketing rather than the other should be more effective, right?
As it turns out, the answer is no. We’re not saying you can’t get good results from just one or the other; we’ve overseen enough success stories to disprove that! But believe it or not, both services are designed to work well together.
Let’s look at why.
Google Isn’t Free
Most of the world has been using Google now for the best part of a quarter of a century. We call using a search engine ‘googling’. It’s easy to think of the search engine as a public service, but it’s not run by a government, it’s run by a corporation.
It’s a huge endeavour, backed up by dozens of other smaller Google projects, and it has to pay for itself. That’s where ads originally came in. They were designed to get your product shown on top of the listings for a fee. Every time someone clicks on your ad link, you pay – but you have that visitor.
If your ad campaign has been designed well and is properly monitored, the business you do from all those paid clicks will still turn a profit even after we factor in this extra cost. If it isn’t, you could do well for a while. Small issues will snowball over time as learning systems aren’t corrected, and the cost per acquisition (CPA) will grow, and it will grow unsupportable.
These ads pay for organic search – the two systems are designed to work together. (Technically, both are actually multiple systems of their own, but we’ll go into that some other time.)
Part of being designed to work together is that both of them work in different ways.
Organic SEO Performance
- It can take a while longer to see business start to improve due to organic performance, depending on a lot of different factors. Usually, SEO executives say that you should be able to see some improvement in the first three months; it can be faster but that’s far from guaranteed.
- If you stop carrying out SEO, you will maintain your performance for a while. How long? That depends how many competitors you have and how good they are. We still don’t recommend it – it’s like stopping for a sit down just because you’re in the lead in a race – but you can.
- At the time of writing, the top three organic results for any search term get an average of around half the clicks for that search. The upper limit on the business SEO can bring in is much higher relative to the investment.
Google Ads Performance
- A properly-designed Google Ads campaign will start to bring in business very quickly. For eCommerce sites this might be sales the same day it launches; for B2B companies serving two or three large contracts a year, lead generation may take a little longer as demand is lower.
- When the campaign is paused or stopped, the business stops.
- The campaign can only bring in as much business as its budget allows. If you spend £500 per month, clicks average out at 50p each, and it takes on average 10 clicks to get a sale (for example), your campaign’s maximum return per month is around 100 sales.
Hidden Extras
We’ve seen a number of clients who’ve looked at all these factors and reached a logical conclusion that goes:
OK, so we’ll run a Google Ads campaign and SEO together for six months or so, then we’ll cancel the Ads campaign and run SEO on its own.
Just like you can have real success running just one of SEO and Paid Ads (let’s not leave Microsoft Ads out – their audience is smaller, but the competition is lower, so the return can be great), this isn’t wrong! But it does miss out on something special: User engagement.
You’ll hear digital marketers talk about user engagement metrics sometimes. These measure how long users are on site, how many pages they visit, whether they fill out forms, watch videos, or make purchases, etc.
Here’s the trick:
Done well, both Google Ads and SEO bring in users who are engaged and who will boost user engagement metrics.
And both SEO and Google Ads benefit from improved user engagement. Search rankings can improve as a result, and Google Ads is known to apply a modifier to your effective bid cost. After all, they still want users to get good results from Ads, or they know users will start to avoid them. Sites with positive user engagement are more likely to get good results.
You can also use SEO to get some visibility from keywords that would cost too much for Ads clicks, and use Ads to bring in traffic on keywords that are too competitive for your SEO to benefit you.
And, of course, keyword research is valuable for both channels, so why not get more value out of it?
SEO and Paid Ads are Stronger Together
So, there you have it; SEO and Google Ads aren’t in competition, or they aren’t if they’re used right. The same is true of social media marketing (organic and paid). In fact, running remarketing campaigns on the right social platform targeting website visitors can be very effective.
Every business is different. Even you and your closest competitor would get the most out of different digital marketing strategies.
Contact First Digital Media
If you’re not sure your strategy is the best for your business, contact our team at First Digital Media. We can provide a full review and recommendations to help you put your digital marketing First. Call us on 01524 544346 or fill out our online contact form.
Find us on LinkedIn.
.