[WATCH] Finding the perfect balance between PPC and SEO – AGS Europe

In an AGS Europe 2021 panel which was held in Malta, Magnus Bråth, CEO at Brath AB, and Ionuț Radu Munteanu, Teacher, Speaker, Digital Marketing Evangelist, and Entrepreneur at Reefkig Solutions discuss how to find the perfect balance between PPC and SEO.

Ionuț Radu Munteanu

In this panel, we see Munteanu and Bråth discussing PPC and SEO. PPC and SEO are two different strategies that share a common goal of driving traffic and they are both components of SEM. Munteanu asks Bråth hat is the fight between PPC and SEO. Bråth says that one of the most interesting parts is “how much of the search result page you own”. He adds that Google is constantly pushing for ads. He adds that in his view, currently, Google’s only competitor is SEO and “if it was not for SEO, the only way of being there would be PPC”. Munteanu says that he sees this fight in two aspects, budget and results. He says that if you are only driving traffic organically, you might have a problem with all the adverts and pop ups on top of the organic results. He adds that one of the hard things is “to be able to manage which budget gets or drives better results in terms of investment in digital marketing”.

Magnus Bråth

Bråth asks the affiliate attendees why they are not running Google ads, to which someone replied that it is too expensive. Munteanu adds that on Saturday (before the panel), Google increased the PPC by 5 to 10 times. Munteanu said that his company had a lot to explain to the customers and that it was a relief when Google said that it was them. He adds that this did not happen with SEO. Bråth agrees that Google ads are expensive, especially in gaming. He continues by saying that there are advantages in both SEO and Google ads, and he says to the affiliate attendees that they are also expensive and they do not sell their traffic cheaply.

Bråth speaks about the smaller markets. He starts by saying that “if you own the organic results, pretty decently you’re ranking number one, and number two, which you can easily do if you’re the first into a smaller market”. He gives some examples of things they do with smaller markets and he mentions what they did with online poker in Brazil 10 years ago where they ranked first or second. He says that “once you keep those positions, then you can force your competitors to pay even more from the Google ads, because you know that you will get the traffic no matter what it cost”. He adds that “you can just crank up your ad spend until neither of you can survive it. Then, all of a sudden, the traffic will drop down to your organic positions”. He says that you can even do this by knowing “how your competitors act and what sort of campaigns they’ve set up”. Munteanu says that this is pretty hard to use this strategy “in the actual battle field”.

Follow the whole panel discussion here:

Munteanu says that a “good research keyword, research by building the search campaigns on Google search”, helps you find out “how much the organic traffic is actually worth in terms of media spent”. Then “think about the returns that you have from the organic” and compare them with “how much you would spend on ads”. Then you can compare “how much money you are saving by not spending it in ads”. He believes that this is “a good tool for SEO, but, in a sense, it actually pushes people to build search ads”. He believes that doing keyword research for SEO by using Google ads is a good balance.

Nowadays, Bråth says, there is still a bit of buying the best links and getting it done; however, we are now moving away from the more aggressive methods which were easy 10 years ago. He adds that the biggest SEO updates that happened during this last year are the core updates, both UX and quality of content. He adds that July (2021) was a big game changer where a large number of sites dropped out and others popped up. Munteanu says that with PPC you need a good quality landing page in order to get the best quality score and so, you get the best price for the click”. He says that this is a way of balancing because “you get the best quality landing page that you build for SEO, then you drive traffic there through PPC, and you get good return on your money because it’s SEO friendly”. He says that this is a good way of how to get the most of the money spent on media.

Bråth asks Munteanu how much does he feels that a strong brand helps in Google ads nowadays. Munteanu replies that nowadays everything should be made into “brand searches”. He adds that every piece of media bought should become organic brand or direct traffic. Everything should be about building “the experience of the customers that come to your website so that when they come back again […], they come back through the brand searches, either paid, organic, or direct traffic sources”.

Munteanu mentions attribution and says that it “is one of the reasons not only PPC and SEO fight, but also the other channels that are involved in the marketing mix”. He says that the cookie-less era is approaching and that would hit a lot of affiliates and marketers. Previously, Bråth mentioned remarketing, and Munteanu now agrees with him saying that “the remarketing list on search ads is incredible”. He adds that they used to use the cookies of people coming to their website through organic searches to then build PPC campaigns; and this is a nice way of balancing. He says that with a PPC ecosystem you get the organic traffic and retarget it to YouTube and like this you build the brand he mentioned earlier; and this is another way of how to balance PPC and SEO.

Munteanu closes the panel on balancing PPC and SEO by saying that you have to see how much money you spend holistically on PPC and SEO, on different campaign segments and levels.

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AGS returns to the United Arab Emirates:

Drawing the leading figures of affiliation to the Middle Eastern metropoles for cutting edge technology, the 2022 AGS UAE expo plans to unite thousands of content marketers, conversation optimisation and lead generation specialists, media buyers, affiliates, SEO gurus, and influencers. Through three days of educational panels, inspiring keynote speeches, workshops, and networking events, the expo seeks to create the foundation that the Industrial Revolution 4.0 can be built upon. Join us from the 20th to 23rd March 2022, in UAE.