You are here and that means that we agree on something… we want to double our sales, and invest less in paid advertising… Let’s start then:
To begin with, it is important to know that the conversion rate of users who arrive at a site through a click on an organic result (SEO) is 14.6%, while those who arrive through an ad or advertisement present a conversion rate 1.7% (Intergrowth, 2021).
This is due to the fact that the organic results are a suggestion that Google makes about the user’s query, while the payments are advertising by the brands, which generates less trust and objectivity in the response quality.
Sounds fantastic right?
Now let’s go to How do we double sales, reducing our investment in Google Ads by 70%?
To begin with, we must know that we have to align both strategies, so that they complement each other and do not compete with each other.
For this we must be able to have defined, and monitor, the keywords that occupy the first three organic results in the Google SERPs and make visible for which of those keywords we are assigning a budget in SEM.
Why do we want to do this?
It is simple, for each click made on a paid ad in Google (SEM), 11.6 clicks are made on organic results (Marketing4eCommerce. 2019), that is, they receive eleven times more visits.
What we will do then is reduce our investment in paid advertising, according to the position that we occupy with that same keyword in SEO. The budget decrease percentage will depend on whether the chances of receiving organic clicks, for that keyword, are higher or lower.
So, for those searches that we are positioning in the #1 result and at the same time making paid guidelines, we will eliminate 100% of the budget that has been assigned. If we already have a presence in the first result naturally, the traffic potential that we can receive is greater, and at the same time, we do not compete against our own brand present with an ad. In addition, according to Advance Web Ranking metrics, the first organic result takes 24% of all clicks from the first page of Google.
For all the keywords in which we have a position in the #2 result, we reduce the investment by 60%. As we mentioned earlier, SEO searches get 11 times more clicks than SEM, so coming in second, we don’t need to allocate an extremely large budget on Google ads. The CTR for a second position is 9.1% of all clicks on the first page of results.
And finally, for those searches that occupy the #3 result, we will make a 30% drop in investment. In this way we will make a balance between the opportunities for clicks that we have due to SEO and those that we will not be able to reach for not occupying the first two positions.
In this position the average percentage of clicks received is 4.92%.
For those keywords that we do not have positioning, we will be able to assign SEM budget, at the same time that we work on SEO actions that allow us to reach the top positions, and when this happens, decrease the investment.
By reducing our budget in those keywords that do not need it, it will allow us to be able to allocate it in others that we are still working on their SEO positioning. This increases the chances of having a presence for a greater number of keywords, and therefore, the chances of generating more sales.
The results will be generated in the first place because we will stop competing with our own site that ranks for a search with both strategies.
