Do you need to pay for SEO if you’re running Google Ads?

SEO and PPC advertising are often put up against each other as marketing activities. The pros and cons are listed and we’re expected to conclude that one or the other is the best solution for your business. Unfortunately, it’s not that black and white and the two strategies are more interwoven than some people realise. So, let’s break down whether SEO is worth the investment if you’re already driving traffic with paid ads.

SEO vs. Google Ads

Search Google for “SEO vs. PPC” and you’ll find tens of thousands of articles giving you the advantages of each, so we won’t go into detail about that here. But, it’s articles like these that make people think they should decide between the two. Google Ads requires an advertising budget in addition to paying a management fee, so it appears as though the cost could be double, making SEO look more attractive. On the other hand, SEO is going to take a while; months or even years, and as impatient people we want results instantly, so we opt for Google Ads.

As Google Ads is a quick way to get exposure on page one of search results, why would you want to pay for SEO that could take months, or years, to gain some traction?

How SEO can help with your Google Ads

SEO has multiple benefits. We often think about the obvious benefit of showing up on page one of search results when our customers are searching for our products and services. But SEO (if done well) has other benefits which will positively impact your results from PPC advertising. Let’s look at 5 examples where optimising your website can boost your advertising ROI!

1. Optimise your Google Shopping campaigns – Google Shopping works differently to search campaigns as you’re not supplying Google with a list of keywords for which you want your products to show. Instead, we supply Google with a feed of product data which is used to determine the relevancy of our products compared to what the user is searching for. This concept of relevancy is where SEO can have a massive impact. If you haven’t optimised your product title and descriptions, you could be missing out on exposure for your Google Shopping ads.
2. More relevant traffic for your Dynamic Search Ads – As with Google Shopping, dynamic search ads don’t use keywords for targeting, so your ads will show when Google believes your website offers what the user is searching for. By optimising your pages with relevant keywords and content, you’ll be providing Google with more detailed information about what your site is about and they will match more relevant searches to your content. Better quality traffic = better PPC results.
3. Improve your Quality Score – your Quality Score (QS) in Google Ads is a score out of ten that is made up of three elements: expected click through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. It’s the third of these elements (landing page experience) that we can influence with SEO by making our pages more relevant and useful. Making sure our keywords are in the right places and we’re providing a good amount of useful content will not only help with your organic search positions, it will also boost your QS. The higher the QS, the higher up your ads will appear and the less you’ll pay for clicks.
4. Improve your conversion rate – no one wants to pay for traffic to their website, only to find that they don’t enquire or purchase from us, so optimising our web pages for usability and accessibility is a great way to improve conversion rate and give you a better return on investment. At the core of Google’s guidelines for SEO are the basic principles of improving the user experience from providing a lot of high quality information about your products and services to optimising how fast your pages load. All these recommendations are likely to positively impact the experience your users have on your site and lead to more conversions from PPC.
5. Save money on ads over the long term – relying on Google Ads for traffic means you’re always going to be paying for traffic. Each month, that might be a small amount, but over time, it can really add up. By investing in SEO you are investing in the future growth of your site. In just a few months, you could grow your organic (free!) traffic that will keep growing year on year without the need for paying for ads indefinitely.

So, if your Google Ads performance is somewhat lacklustre, maybe it’s time to invest in some SEO to give them a boost!

At Skittish, we find that SEO is part of the Google Ads process, not separate from it. If a website isn’t well optimised for search (or users!), its results on Google Ads will always be limited. So, in a nutshell, it’s not one or the other, you should be using both for maximum impact and return on investment.