Treating paid ads and SEO as separate budgets, teams, and KPIs will put you on the fast track to suboptimal performance. This usually leads to your paid budget acting as a cap on your organic traffic, rather than a supplement. This creates an artificial restriction on your maximum potential, reduces the long-term impact your efforts will have, and is one of the quickest ways to needlessly burn money.
The Cost Problem With Going All-In On Paid
Customer acquisition expenses of online retail brands have grown by 222% in the last 8 years (SimplicityDX). This single fact should put to rest any final arguments about whether a paid-only strategy is sustainable at any size.
We all know the primary suspects – privacy changes reduced the precision of paid social targeting and made many marketers shift spend to Google Search and Shopping; attractive performance metrics drew more brands into the online ad market; and low CPMs reached their logical end in a crowded, more competitive ad marketplace with the same inventory.
The more it costs to acquire customers on a paid performance basis, the less headroom a brand has to spend on advertising in excess of contribution margin – a prerequisite to long term brand building.
The profitability equation for a fast-growth brand doing between $5 and $15 mil a year in revenue has always been tough. It goes something like this: buy Facebook or Instagram ads for between 8 – 12% of revenue. Allocate another 3 – 5% for growth-related tech spend to keep the customer acquisition engine humming. Subtract 50% COGS and 10% of what’s left for fixed costs like rent and insurance. Hope what’s left is more than half of the required $500,000 to spend on those ads. Hope you never need to raise too much money to grow because doing so would put profitability even further out of reach. Minimize the few growth levers you have by being cautious or boring. Hope the price to acquire a customer doesn’t go up too much year over year.
Paid Search As A Data Engine For Organic
Many ecommerce operators overlook the search term report inside Google Ads as one of the most powerful keyword research tools available; it’s real purchase intent data.
When someone clicks a paid Shopping ad or a search text ad and converts, that query is added to a report. Over time, you accumulate a list of queries that drive revenue. Not clicks – revenue. That’s a superpower above and beyond what keyword planning tools provide, because it’s a measure of real conversion behavior.
Ok, so how does your SEO team use this? As the paid search team, you pull a search term report filtered by conversions; you can do this for short or long-term date ranges. Hand that list to your SEO team, and they review the queries for words and concepts where you typically rank on the second or third page of search results organically… but you’re paying for clicks every time that term is searched.
Your SEO team doesn’t need to know where those terms came from, just that they do convert for you. They can work them into existing pages or articles they’re drafting. If campaigns are already planned around those themes, others can be moved up in priority. Voilà, your SEO team just adopted a list of search terms they know from day one have value to your business – from your paid search efforts. Writers will often lift a headline or product-copy angle from a pun website to keep those pages engaging enough to earn clicks and shares.
The Cash Flow Reality Of Building Organic Authority
The revenue from organic search is not generated immediately. This is a more realistic version of how long it takes that most SEO conversations ignore.
For example, a new collection page optimized for a high-volume category keyword will probably not achieve a ranking that drives significant traffic for at least six to 12 months. However, the improvements you’re making to technical SEO to facilitate organic search growth further benefit you when you look at a longer period (like a year or more).
In the interim, you’re already running those ads. If you stop them, you lose that revenue. If you don’t have organic traffic levels needed to rely on it for revenue, ads still account for almost all of that new customer’s cost.
It’s a Catch-22 that requires planning and foresight to navigate. You need to be running the ads to make current cash flow work while you develop organic as a sustainable revenue source. Ads bring in the customers you need time to build organic traffic. You can redirect ad spend toward organic as that traffic increases and converts, but that takes time – many marketers list it as six to 12 months.
Owning The SERP For Your Own Brand Terms
It may seem like a waste of money to place bids on your brand name in Google Ads if your organic search ranking is already at the top, but it depends on the competition. If a competitor bids on your brand name, there’s a good chance their ad will appear above your top organic listing, and some users will click their ad without scrolling down. In that case, you’re losing traffic that was already bound for your website.
The best approach for this scenario is typically to keep a low bid campaign on your brand terms with a small budget that simply ensures your organic result stays at the top. Then you let your organic listing handle actual conversions. Brand terms have high quality scores, so your CPC is still low, and you far out-bid any competitor since they’re paying the bidding against their own relevance. This ensures maximum traffic for the least cost.
Technical SEO and The Platform Problem
The primary focus when building major ecommerce platforms is to allow the quick launching of a store. This is their main priority. Long-term organic search performance is not a priority, and the default configurations make that obvious.
Take Shopify as an example. Right after installation, duplicate content is generated through collection-based URL paths. This means that the same product page can be accessed through multiple URLs, depending on how a user has navigated to it. This directly affects crawl efficiency and can weaken the authority of a page. In addition, the platform offers little flexibility when it comes to robots.txt configuration, and you should never assume that the canonical tag has been correctly implemented. Although these aren’t reason enough to abandon the platform – on the contrary, it is a very good platform – they do redefine the concept of optimization performance based on other requirements.
This is why growing stores often seek out a Shopify SEO agency to identify and resolve the restrictions that this platform can pose on the scalability of your store before investing too heavily in content. The product funnel should be in good shape prior to acquiring the necessary content and links. It is nonsense to invest in organic on a site that has serious crawl and duplication problems. It’s like filling up a bucket that’s full of holes.
And that’s not all. Google’s Core Web Vitals (Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, Interaction to Next Paint) affect both organic rankings and your Google Ads Quality Score. This means that slow or visually unstable product pages will be doubly punished. They will become more expensive for paid traffic and they will appear lower organically. Fixing your page will thus not only be an SEO necessity but it will also allow you to commit less budget to your paid media.
Turning Organic Visitors Into Paid Retargeting Audiences
One of the most effective strategies in a two-channel marketing plan is creating paid retargeting lists from organic visitors, not just paid clicks.
Think about it. Someone who lands on your site from an organic search about “best camping gear” is clearly being drawn into the sales funnel, due to his interest in camping gear. However, a user would be deeper in the funnel if they had clicked on a paid ad and then visited your site. So they’re not ready to convert, but they’ve already shown interest. It costs next to nothing to show an ad to that person, using a paid retargeting ad, since they’re a warm lead.
Organic traffic is also the best source of first-party data for building those segmented retargeting audiences: you can use their habits on your site, pages viewed, time on site, etc., to create super-specific lists in Google and paid social. Your blog has done the job of bringing in that signal of interest for you, at zero cost – your ad spend only acts as the conversion step to complete the purchase.
However, the tagging and feed between analytics and ads can be time consuming to set up, and your blog/landing page needs to have enough high-funnel intent about it to draw these cheap, high-quality leads in. But it gets more and more effective as you grow your organic traffic – more visitors mean more potential members of your retargeting list, fewer dollars spent showing to the wrong person, and lower costs for that click due to improved audience match qualities.
Product Schema As Shared Infrastructure
Implementing structured data is a technical endeavor that often ensures benefits for two different areas but isn’t a high priority for either one.
For starters, clean product schema) markup, including price, availability, review count, and aggregate rating, can trigger rich snippets in organic search results. Rich snippets enhance organic search results by displaying additional information, making your listing look more like paid shopping ads and significantly boosting click-through rates. The same product schema data, if correctly structured, can also improve your performance in Google Merchant Center as the paid shopping ads and product listing results use the same product feed data.
Getting the schema right once means both organic results and paid product feeds work better. Errors in product feeds will impact your ad eligibility, and missing or broken product schema markup rules out your organic rich snippets. Both problems cost money, and both are solved by the same underlying work.
Building Search Equity As A Long-Term Asset
Advertising costs money continuously while organic search results continue providing returns over time. This is an important difference in the life cycle of any e-commerce business. In the initial phase of growth, money from paid advertising can be used to fund organic investments. In the scaling phase, both organic and paid methods can be used, while the insights from paid advertising can be used to further improve the organic ROI. When the business is mature, a solid organic base can safeguard your margins while paid ads make costs fluctuate due to increasing competition and changes in algorithms.
If paid ads were used without building up the flywheel, as it’s the case for some brands that rely only on paid forms of advertising, those stuck in the competition haven’t built up an organic avenue to find new customers. You may have a darling sales channel that has generated incredible leverage for years, but that breaks when everyone starts paying. Those mired in paid can’t afford not to be, which means you’re spending against competitors who can.
The focus isn’t to spend less money on ads. It’s to ensure that every dollar you spend is also creating some kind of asset for tomorrow’s customer acquisition. This is the main difference between the growth marketing strategies of yesterday and those of the next decade.
