SEO (search engine optimization) vs PPC (pay per click marketing) - Which digital marketing strategy is better?
We think we found a definitive answer on this.
Our team ran an experiment to find out exactly whether SEO or PPC was superior for the average small business.
Our Case Study 🧠
We ran an SEO vs PPC campaign simultaneously for a completely new business in the travel industry called Flock Events.
👉 Here's what we did:
- We started off with SEO, generating page 1 rankings for our major target keywords.
- We then launched PPC campaigns on Google to drive new customers.
The Results
Below are the results for both our PPC campaigns vs. SEO campaigns and exactly how they performed overall.
1) PPC Results
We ran PPC ads on Google targeting high-value search terms like:
- "Hen Party Houses"
- "Luxury Hen Party Houses"
- "Hen Party Houses Scotland"
- "Hen Party Houses Bath"
- "Hen Party Houses Bristol"
Here are the results from the Google Ads search campaign we ran for approximately 12 months.
- Total Spend - £8,673.65
- Total Clicks - 18,216
- Bid Strategy - Maximize Conversions
- Conversion Rate - 10.08% (see this guide for standards across all industries)
- Conversions - 1836 (conversion being a filled email form)
- Avg. CPC - £0.48
- Cost / Conversion - £4.72
- Conversion to Paying Customer Rate - 1 in 8
Cost to acquire a new customer - £37.76
We were able to drive conversions for a cost of £4.72, which in this case was a qualified lead that submitted a form to the sales team expressing interest in one of the holiday packages.
For every 'conversion' from Google Ads, the sales team were able to close around 1 in 8 of these into paying customers.
That's a total cost to acquire a customer of £37.76 from PPC.
The Final Numbers - PPC
- The revenue on each paying customer is approximately £856
- The net profit on each paying customer (after all business costs, advertising costs) is approximately £490
- ROAS for this campaign = 2267%
- ROI (factoring in costs) = 1297.7%
That means that for every £1 invested in PPC, we're getting a net profit return of nearly £13.
This is obviously a ridiculously good result.
For reference - At our PPC agency, if we can get a return of £3 profit for every £1 invested, that's usually good enough to be able to scale advertising spend considerably.
Any lower than that figure, and you're going to be struggling with your profit margins, especially in Ecommerce.
So this project was certainly an outlier in terms of how effective PPC has been.
2) SEO Results
Since we have a strong SEO background, we know what it takes to build up results fast.
The goal was to create content around keywords that has good organic search volume on Google, in order to get our pages ranking above the competition.
We firstly created a series of strong pages across the website, both informational + commercial pages.
For example:
- 'Best Hen Party Houses Scotland' - This is a very readable article which includes featured properties and experiences.
- 'Hen Party Accommodation Bath' - This is more like the type of result you might find on Booking.com or AirBnB, where properties are listed in a more familiar style and you can click into each property for more information.
Here's an example:
And another one:
Here are our SEO results from the past 12 months:
- Total Spend (Content & Backlinks) - £11,211.44
- Total SEO Traffic - 20,816
- Conversion Rate - 3.05%
- Conversions - 635 (conversion being a filled email form)
- Avg. cost per click - £0.25
- Cost / Conversion - £17.65
- Conversion to Paying Customer Rate - 1 in 8
Total cost to acquire a new customer from SEO - £141.20
The Final Numbers - SEO
- The revenue on each paying customer is approximately £856
- The net profit on each paying customer (after all business costs, advertising costs) is approximately £490
- ROI (factoring in costs) = 1297.7%
That means that for every £1 invested in SEO, we're getting a net profit return of £3.50.
Comparing PPC vs SEO
Let's compare the results of SEO vs PPC side by side:
- For every £1 invested in SEO, we're getting a net profit return of £3.50.
- For every £1 invested in PPC, we're getting a net profit return of nearly £13.
Clearly PPC is the winner, right? 🤨
Well, it's more complicated than that...
You see, if we turned off all of our PPC advertising and investment tomorrow, the number of conversions from PPC would immediately drop to zero.
However, if we never invested another penny into SEO, there's a good chance that we would continue to reap the rewards of our current SEO performance for quite some time into the future 📈
In fact, in the long term, SEO might even surpass PPC in terms of return on investment!
However, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the better option.
Choosing Between SEO vs PPC
We've put together some of the pros and cons for SEO vs PPC in the graphic below.
SEO - Pros & Cons
Pros of SEO:
✅ SEO is typically cheaper in the long run.
✅ It has the potential to generate a huge amount of traffic.
✅ Typically captures far more top of funnel searches.
Cons of SEO:
❌ SEO takes lots of time.
❌ It’s incredibly competitive.
❌ Google’s algorithm can change at any time.
❌ Google will always show advertisers first.
When to use SEO?
- You want to create content that hits your audience at different stages in the funnel.
- Your product is complex and requires a lot of supporting content and information.
- Your marketing budget is low.
- You’re happy to wait years for results.
SEO is a slow burner that can yield tremendous ROI in the long-term.
PPC - Pros & Cons
Pros of PPC:
✅ PPC is very fast to implement.
✅ You can generate customers rapidly & scale fast.
✅ You can target customers granularly based on location, age, keywords etc.
Cons of PPC:
❌ It can become very expensive in competitive niches.
❌ Users are often attuned to skipping past adverts.
When to use PPC?
- You need customers right away.
- You know exactly what you’re willing to pay to acquire a customer.
- You have strong website design & conversion.
- You want to completely dominate your industry (this is very difficult to do without PPC)
PPC will let you scale fast & get strong-fit customers right away.
Great Industries for PPC
To be honest, PPC marketing can work with most industries, but it's better suited to certain types of industries just because of how Google's search results work.
Here's some industries that may thrive with PPC:
- Ecommerce - It's very tough to get meaningful Ecommerce traffic from SEO nowadays.
- Healthcare - Dentists, Doctors, Cosmetic Beauty.
- Legal Services - Google pushes both local service ads + standard search ads for lawyers.
- Home Services - Plumbing, HVAC, Pest Control - these all thrive with PPC marketing because people searching for these services need an immediate solution.
- Travel - This niche is so competitive that it's hard to compete without PPC, and as we've seen in this case study, it's surprisingly cheap to compete in this industry.
- Automotive - You can capture searches quite easily for buyer-intent keywords around cars.
Great Industries for SEO
Generally speaking, industries that thrive with SEO marketing are the ones where a lot of educational content is required.
Here's some industries that may thrive with SEO:
- Media - Any media or news company (no matter how big or small) needs an SEO strategy to succeed.
- Education - There's just so much content out there to be created in education, regardless of the sub-niche. For example, a company that focuses on providing management training would almost certainly thrive with an SEO strategy.
- Technology & Software - Most software & technology tools are catered towards and audience who really want to harness the power of technology to solve various problems in their business. This opens up the opportunity to create a ton of educational content targeting people at the top of the marketing funnel.
The Ideal Combination
In an ideal World, you’d use a combination of both SEO and PPC.
With PPC you’re only ever going to realistically send customers to ‘commercial’ pages for the most part, not informational pages.
So SEO can be used as a means to target customers higher up the funnel who are just beginning to explore a new topic.
And then you can leverage the power of PPC alongside remarketing to close potential customers that are much further down the sales funnel and are closer to making a decision on a product or solution.