Sometimes having a great product or service isn’t enough to drive new visitors to your site. And with the roughly $25.93 trillion e-commerce market projected to grow 18.9% in the next six years, no one can afford to have a sub-standard digital marketing strategy anymore.
Knowing how to get the most out of your website – whether through optimizing content for search engines, optimizing your user experience, or driving traffic with digital ads – can be tricky. With the right strategy, expanding your digital presence can have a substantial impact on your business. But with the wrong targets, channels, or budgets, you can end up throwing away money each month with little to no return.
We’re here to help you get the most out of your digital marketing efforts, starting with some of the most common questions we receive and some answers from our experts. If you’d like to do more with your digital marketing, we can help you with that, too.
Will Running Paid Google Ads Affect My Organic Search Rankings?
Not directly, no. Traffic that arrives on your site after clicking on a paid ad won’t have any effect on your search rankings. Google ardently separates the two channels so advertisers can’t pay their way to better rankings.
However, there are quite a few ways that paid ads can indirectly influence other traffic channels. Traffic that comes from paid channels is only tagged as “paid” traffic for that session. If they leave the site and come back at another time from another source, they’re no longer considered paid traffic.
While visitors might discover your site through paid ads, their return visit would be considered “direct” traffic if they go right to your site. Paid ads, particularly display ads, also influence brand recall. This is the likelihood that someone will associate your brand name with a product or service and visit your site in future.
None of these visits would be considered paid traffic, which means any engagement with your site by these users will factor into your organic search rankings.
SEO is all about relevant, authoritative content that helps users answer their questions. But paid ads are designed to reach users wherever they are on the web. The two tactics work best when they work together to serve your strategy.
What Should My Target Budget for Paid Ads Be?
There’s no such thing as one ideal budget. The right number will vary tremendously depending on which platform you’re using, what type of ads you’re running, and who your audience is.
Your budget should also consider a few key factors:
- The volume of searches for the keywords you’re bidding on
- Your target cost per click
- Conversion rates (how often ads turn clicks into customers, if that’s your goal)
- What return you get from your ad spend
This balance of spending and return is the key to finding the right budget. It’s one that can take time – and some experimentation – to get right.
This gets a bit trickier if you’re running a campaign focused on brand awareness or a less concrete metric. If generating traffic to your website is your only goal, then any visit to the site is a successful conversion, right?
Maybe. But you don’t want just clicks. You want the right clicks. You want visitors that are genuinely engaged with your content.
To track the value of these efforts, watch your engagement metrics. If you see high bounce rates and low page scroll percentages from paid traffic, you’re probably not reaching an audience that’s interested in what you offer. In that case, the budget you’re burning on digital ads isn’t returning much value.
Is Optimizing Content for Search Engines Even Worth Doing Anymore?
It’s true – organic search results aren’t what they used to be. Recent shifts in the search experience have turned results pages into even more hotly contested real estate than they already were. A slew of features, paid ads, and AI-generated results can push even the No. 1 1 search result on Google halfway down the page, in some cases.
If even the No. 1 result is competing with so many other distracting features, including paid search ads, wouldn’t it make sense to ignore SEO completely and focus your budget on buying that top spot, instead?
Actually, no. Recent studies have shown that sites ranking in the top 3 for any given search still get about 54% of all clicks on Google’s results pages. And that’s just the top 3 places, with the No. 1 result leading the bunch at 28% click-through-rate (CTR). Every single step down the rankings cuts the CTR by about 33%.
That’s a lot of potential traffic that’s almost impossible to reach (for searches that don’t include your brand name, at least) without some investment in SEO.
In fact, recent changes to the search experience have only made good SEO more important. The front page has become so loaded with information that the old digital marketing adage “no one ever visits the second page of Google results” is now more than an adage – it’s essentially fact. Less than .5% of search users ever reach page two.
Users that find your site through organic search are also more likely to engage with your site, whatever your desired goal might be. On average, about 2-3% of organic search visitors will “convert” into customers, while paid ads often aim for slightly more than half of that. That makes organic search one of the most efficient ways to drive likely, motivated customers.
But all SEO can do is drive traffic to your site. To set your website up for success, you need content and design that’s optimized for driving conversions. Check out some of our other blog posts and webinar recordings for insights into content design and conversion optimization.
When you’re ready to learn more, we can help you reach your audience through search and create a user experience that turns them into future customers. Reach out and let’s talk!