Increase your profitability by combining SEO and Ads
SEO and Google Ads used to be seen as ‘competitors’. The perception was that the channels were cannibalising each other. You had these two schools of thought: Why advertise in Google when you are already there organically? Ads give a good ROI, so why spend time and money on search engine optimisation? Fortunately, this feeling is less prevalent as data shows that leveraging both channels is profitable.
Expertise SEO & SEA
By Justen Vink
The odds that a potential customer becomes a customer after just one website visit, are very slim. What often happens, is customers having multiple contact moments with the website and only then become customers. These moments of contact may arise because you are active on multiple channels. For example, someone first enters a blog through organic search results, and at a later point the same person clicks on your ad and becomes a customer.
How does this work in practice? Because if you want to work with both channels, it has to be in a way that is proportionally more profitable than working with one. The result ‘more sales’ or ‘more revenue’ means nothing if the total costs have proportionally risen much harder. This is why, in this insight, we will show how to make the two channels work together optimally.
Targeting the best ROI
To do this, first analyse each channel separately. When you monetise the costs, advertising is often easier to map than search engine optimisation, because there is often a time commitment involved as well.
When it comes to advertising, you can easily see what the strategy has achieved on the bottom line. You can see which product groups or landing pages give the best conversion and also know the costs involved.
Another common measurement tool to get an indication of performance is the cost-per-click, known as CPC (cost-per-click). This model for knowing how much a visitor costs can also be applied (with some work) to SEO. It’s not perfect, but it does give some insights which you would not have had otherwise. And helps determine your SEO and Ads strategy.
Mapping SEO CPC
Whereas with advertising you often can create a printout in a jiffy, to calculate SEO CPC you need a few more steps.
With search engine optimisation, you can make a year-on-year comparison and look at visitors and revenue, among other things. Whereas with Ads-CPC is about cost per click, with SEO it translates into cost per session, so you can compare this with Ads as well.
In simple terms, SEO is made up of three pillars: technology, on-page adjustments and authority building. You can attach a price to the things done internally. X hours times a certain amount. Or if you have one person or a team on it, you can take the salary for convenience. From what you outsource of that, you can map out the annual amount of invoices and the same goes for any software. Now you roughly have the total SEO costs.
Ideally, you should also allocate a portion to the focus categories you paid the most attention to in that year. After all, this gives a fairer picture because that is where most of your resources went.
Simply put: you allocate 1/3 to the homepage and ‘other’ and 2/3 to your focus categories and underlying pages. If you have more precise insight, that’s obviously better, but this analysis is also not an end in itself.
What you end up with is a table with your URL in one column and your allocated costs in column two. When you add a third column with the calculated visitor difference compared to a year earlier, you can finally calculate the SEO CPC. You divide the amount by the extra visitors and then you have the CPC per session. Then you can convert that to a percentage and you also have the budget ratios.
Is this analysis completely fair? No, because if you do nothing you might have had less traffic. So you’d want to include that difference too, but then you’ll be working with assumptions again. This analysis is purely to get a relative insight within the SEO work what has worked out best and least well, but so this says nothing about SEO performance as a whole. For that, this analysis is too simple, because you are deliberately not including other factors.
Bringing SEO and Ads together
You now have the Ads CPC and the SEO CPC and within each channel you can see the differences, but you can now make channel comparisons. How does a URL perform within both SEO and Ads?
The most interesting thing is to look at biggest deviations of both channels. These are the ‘ugly ducklings’ in terms of CPCs of Ads and SEO. These probably already present an immediate opportunity to support them with the other channel, because the costs relative to visitor numbers are relatively high, which makes the chance real that you can achieve higher returns with the other channel. What you create with this are budget shifts within the channel and possibly also between the channels. Also, this can also affect your seasonal approach.
If the analysis shows that the costs for good post-season positioning are higher than expected and the return is lower while at the same time you see that the SEO CPC of the pre-season and orientation phase is relatively low, it is logical to shift the focus of the SEO to the pre-season and orientation phase.
At the same time, it makes sense to scale up ads in the post-season when they are significantly lower than the SEO CPC. That way, more ROI can be created with Ads vs SEO for that particular category.
At Aspen Digital, the focus is on creating search engine visibility for relevant website traffic. Search engine marketing is most profitable for your business. Data and our in-house developed tooling support this growth process, so we make informed choices based on your product/service offering aimed at your profitability.
