Does Good SEO Eliminate The Need For PPC? Google Say No

Have you ever wondered what the real value of combining PPC and SEO search engine marketing strategies is?  If you have your SEO strategy down pat and consistently achieve a high natural ranking when users search for relevant terms, should you also be investing in PPC ads?  Can paying for search advertising actually cannibalise your organic search traffic – are you paying for ads you do not need, which would flip to organic results in the absence of ads?

A new study from Google suggests that, interestingly, SEO and PPC have, on average, a very small overlap, implying that getting both right is essential when devising your search marketing strategy.

The study uses complex mathematical formulas to look at how organic search traffic changes in the absence of search ads.  They ran over 400 studies on paused accounts, building a statistical model that predicted click volume for various given levels of PPC ad spend.  The model then generates estimates for the level of incremental clicks attributable to search ads (essentially, the percentage of paid clicks that would not have happened in the absence of PPC).

The results showed that the average incremental ad clicks percentage is 89%; in other words, 89% of the traffic from PPC ads would disappear if they were eliminated, and not be replaced by clicks on organic results

Obviously, Google have a vested interest in keeping you paying for your PPC.  However, the data, if nothing else, seems to prove that SEO and PPC are equally vital to the success of a search marketing strategy.