One of the things I frequently hear when discussing digital marketing with businesses launching a new website is that they’re planning to use Google AdWords to generate traffic initially, before gradually switching over to SEO once the website has become established. On the face of it, this sounds like a perfectly reasonable strategy: paid advertising can start generating visitors almost immediately, whereas achieving good organic search engine rankings can take considerably longer. However, there’s a fairly fundamental problem with this approach, and that’s the assumption that you’ll eventually reach a point where your SEO is performing so well that you no longer need to advertise.
Having worked with both SEO and PPC campaigns for many years, I’m not convinced that this is a particularly realistic objective for most businesses. In fact, I’d argue that if your Google AdWords campaigns are generating a decent return on investment, there’s probably very little reason to switch them off in the first place.
Why Do Businesses See PPC as a Temporary Solution?
I think much of this comes down to the perception that SEO generates free traffic, whereas PPC involves paying for every visitor. If you’re spending £1,000 a month on Google AdWords, it’s tempting to imagine how much money you could save if you were receiving exactly the same visitors through Google’s organic search results instead.
Unfortunately, this overlooks two important considerations. Firstly, SEO isn’t free, particularly when you’re operating in a competitive market. Whether you’re paying an agency, employing somebody internally or spending your own time improving your website, there’s still a cost involved in achieving and maintaining those rankings. Secondly, there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever generate the same volume of relevant traffic organically, regardless of how much effort you put into your SEO.
For example, imagine you’re launching a new ecommerce website selling office furniture. You might be able to generate sales immediately through Google AdWords by targeting searches for particular products, but achieving first-page organic rankings for competitive phrases such as ‘office chairs’ could take years, assuming you manage to achieve them at all.
SEO Is Harder Than Many People Think
One of the biggest misconceptions about SEO is that once your website has been properly optimised, it’s simply a matter of waiting for Google to recognise how good it is and start sending you visitors.
Unfortunately, that’s not really how it works. Google has to decide which websites deserve to appear prominently for millions of different searches, and for commercially valuable keywords, there’s often an enormous amount of competition. You might have a technically excellent website containing useful content, but if you’re competing against established retailers with thousands of products, substantial marketing budgets and years of accumulated backlinks, you’re unlikely to overtake them simply by writing a few blog posts.
There’s also the fact that your competitors aren’t standing still. While you’re trying to improve your rankings, they’re potentially investing in their own SEO, creating new content and improving their websites. Reaching the first page of Google isn’t necessarily the end of the process either, because maintaining those positions can require continued effort.
This doesn’t mean SEO isn’t worthwhile, but I think businesses need to be realistic about how long it can take and how much work is involved.
Why Would You Turn Off Profitable Advertising?
This is probably the most important point, and one that I think gets overlooked surprisingly often.
Let’s say you’re spending £1,000 a month on Google AdWords and generating £5,000 in sales as a result. Assuming your products have sufficient profit margins to cover the advertising costs and leave you with a worthwhile return, why would you want to stop?
The fact that you’re paying Google for those visitors doesn’t necessarily make them less valuable than visitors arriving through organic search results. If you’re generating £2 in profit for every £1 spent on advertising, switching off your campaigns would simply mean giving up an activity that’s making you money.
Of course, it’s important to measure profitability properly. Generating £5,000 in revenue from £1,000 in advertising isn’t particularly impressive if the products you’re selling only have a 10% profit margin. However, provided you’re accounting for your costs and generating a genuine return, I’d generally be looking for opportunities to increase advertising expenditure rather than eliminate it.
This is why I think businesses should stop treating PPC as a temporary expense that needs to disappear once SEO starts working. In many circumstances, it’s a profitable marketing channel in its own right.
Can’t Organic Traffic Replace Paid Traffic?
There are certainly situations where organic search traffic can reduce your reliance on paid advertising, particularly if you achieve strong rankings for the keywords you’ve previously been targeting through AdWords.
However, it’s worth remembering that appearing in both the paid and organic search results can provide additional visibility. Just because your website ranks third organically doesn’t mean everybody who might have clicked your advertisement will automatically find and click your organic listing instead.
Google has previously published research suggesting that paid search advertisements can generate additional clicks even when the advertiser already has an organic listing. While I’d treat Google’s own research with some caution, given that it obviously has a commercial interest in encouraging businesses to advertise, the principle makes sense.
It’s also important to consider which searches generate your most profitable customers. You might eventually rank well organically for some of your target keywords, while others remain difficult to reach without paid advertising. In those circumstances, there’s no particular reason why you can’t continue advertising for the searches where PPC delivers worthwhile results.
PPC Can Actually Help Your SEO Strategy
Another advantage of running Google AdWords campaigns alongside SEO is that paid advertising can provide useful information about which keywords and landing pages generate the most valuable traffic.
For example, you might discover that a particular search phrase generates plenty of visitors but very few enquiries, while another produces fewer clicks but a much higher conversion rate. This information can help you decide which keywords are worth concentrating on when developing your SEO strategy.
AdWords can also help you test different messages and landing pages without waiting months to see whether changes to your organic rankings have made a difference. Although paying for advertising doesn’t directly improve your organic search rankings, the information you collect can certainly help you make better decisions about your website.
Personally, I think SEO and PPC work particularly well when they’re managed together, rather than being treated as two completely separate activities competing for the same marketing budget.
When Should You Reduce Your PPC Spending?
That’s not to say you should continue spending money on advertising indefinitely without reviewing whether it’s worthwhile. If a campaign is consistently generating poor-quality enquiries or unprofitable sales, there’s obviously a good reason to reconsider it.
Similarly, if you’ve achieved strong organic rankings and find that reducing your advertising spend has little or no effect on overall sales, you might reasonably conclude that some of your paid traffic is unnecessary.
However, I’d recommend testing this rather than simply assuming that organic search will replace your paid visitors. Look at the overall number of enquiries or sales your website generates, rather than concentrating exclusively on how many conversions AdWords claims to have produced.
Ultimately, I think businesses would be better off viewing SEO and PPC as complementary marketing activities rather than assuming one will eventually replace the other.
SEO can provide an excellent long-term source of traffic, but achieving strong rankings is considerably more difficult than many people realise, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever reach a point where you can rely on it exclusively.
If your AdWords campaigns are generating profitable business, my advice would be to keep running them while continuing to invest in SEO. The objective should be generating as much profitable business as possible, rather than eliminating advertising expenditure simply because you’re now receiving visitors from Google for free.