Is your Google Ads bill getting bigger and bigger, your cost per click higher and higher, and your return on marketing investment lower and lower? There is an alternative. Find out about Sustainable Search Marketing here.

In today’s ultra-competitive search market, Advertisers know that if they want to capture their target audience, they need to appear at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) for each and every relevant search. Because of Google Ads' auction pricing model, advertisers are forced to bid higher and higher to appear at the top of their target searches, leading to the click inflation levels that many advertisers are now facing, and the diminishing ROI that most experience.

Return on Investment is further reduced if higher click costs lead to budgets maxing out, and your ads not appearing in all the searches that you need to appear for.

As tempting as it is to focus marketing efforts and budget on Google Ads, because of the platform's amazing reach, controllability and immediacy, it can lead to a reliance, which can only be fueled by more and more spending. In a world of higher click costs and lower returns, this spend has to increase each month just to stay still.

Is there an alternative to PPC?

Over 80% of Google searches don’t trigger Google Ads, a fact reinforced when you look at the top searches in the US and the UK in 2023. This means that there is a huge volume of navigational, informational and highly focused but niche, transactional and commercial intent searches that can only be targeted through good SEO. Many of these search terms are essential elements in your buyer journey and will lead to higher conversions and greater customer satisfaction.

Furthermore, investment in good SEO isn’t a case of ‘once it’s gone, it’s gone’. It should lead to a sustainable search presence that doesn’t disappear when your budget is exhausted. This means your visibility is better, your brand is stronger, and your ROI is vastly better.

In the example of our client, referred to in this case study, if they were to pay for the clicks they have received over the last year from organic search, it would cost over ten times what they have invested in SEO. And we know, by trending and then projecting their growth trajectory forward, that their ROI will most probably double next year. Even if they were to cut SEO investment, although their visibility might decline, it wouldn’t disappear in the same way that turning off the Google Ads Tap would.

Education Client Case Study Organic Traffic Growth

Many people, quite rightly, worry about the length of time SEO takes to work, because, no doubt about it, the real value of good SEO will only be seen over the long term, however, that’s not to say good SEO can’t deliver results quite quickly.

We started working with this brand-new website in January, which had been launched for just a couple of months. You can see here that visibility started to improve almost immediately and has grown consistently since then.

Brand-New Website Organic Search Visibility Growth First Year

Organic Traffic has followed suit, so much so that by May, the value of the organic traffic was starting to pay back the previous month's investment, and now, based on the organic traffic value compared to the client investment in SEO, we are demonstrating positive ROI.

Brand-New Website Organic Search Traffic Growth First Year

PPC is still vital for a large number of terms and can be regulated much more easily, depending on your business needs and budget however, by utilizing good SEO within your marketing strategy, you can achieve a much wider and deeper presence, a far greater degree of trust and brand authority, a much-improved customer knowledge of your products and services, far higher customer satisfaction and a much-improved Return on Investment. Good SEO will also improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your PPC and mean you’re not reliant on just one channel.

When you’re planning your marketing budget, see how good SEO can be incorporated into your marketing mix, see how it and transform your presence and see how a Sustainable Search Marketing Strategy can enable your business to grow profitably.