B2B Web Strategy Blog - eMagine

Can’t we do without PPC once we get a good organic search ranking?

June 27th, 2008 Posted by: Bill Gadless

It’s a fairly common narrative:  our client XYZ Co. starts up a PPC program while waiting for their search engine optimization (SEO) to kick in …typically following a website redo.  Once they see their results-page ranking move up to acceptable levels, we can expect to get the plaintive question:  “Can’t we stop spending on PPC now?”  (Sometimes the thought has been planted by a certain segment of SEO houses, who trumpet those savings as much of the payback that justifies their fees.)

As professional Web marketing consultants, we would advise “no”, in most cases.  So does Kevin Lee, in his thoughtful ClickZ piece, “Is organic search enough?”;  in fact, he says that “pulling PPC ads after achieving high organic position may, in fact, be a very bad idea.”

There are a number of reasons for this.  For one thing, search engine results pages aren’t the monolith they used to be:  personalization of search is increasingly diverging results; and different syndication partners may not only display results differently, but are increasingly fiddling with the underlying algorithms.  So that great rank you may think you have, based on one instance, may not extrapolate to uniformly great visibility across all outlets and search instances.

Other factors at work…
But even assuming the old, more uniform search world, there are other factors that may act to maintain PPC’s worth, including:

Competitive landscape –  If your organic listing is surrounded by enemies, then PPC is probably more important to you than if you enjoy relative solitude.

Messaging –  If the page associated with your high organic rank conveys your message properly, all is well.  If not, fiddling with any on-page elements can be disastrous;  so you’ll be better off using paid placement titles, descriptions, and landing pages to effectively communicate your message and offer to site visitors.

Conversion –  Because you have far more flexibility with PPC in ad creative and landing pages, you’ll need to look at possible differences in conversion effectiveness …not just clicks to your site.

Testing always tells the tale.
The above qualitative considerations aside, the definitive way to reach the right choice in your environment is, of course, via testing.  This of course requires turning PPC off for a week or so (long enough to be statistically meaningful in your traffic context) and capturing every analytic, down to conversion rate and ROI …or at least lead quality.

In Kevin’s work with clients, such testing has always showed high ROI for PPC, even after factoring out cannibalization (PPC “stealing” clicks from organic).  And the better the paid landing page, the higher the net gain in ROI.  Our experience is quite similar.

If you’re unsure about testing to determine your optimal search marketing strategy, you may want to seek guidance from your search marketing consultants;  they do this a lot.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy, Internet Marketing, PPC, Search Engine Marketing