BrightBid are focused on providing our customers with better value from Search Engine Marketing as a whole even though we only focus on Google Pay per Click PPC channel and not Google SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

We find that many of our customers do not need to bid on their own brand search terms for Google PPC as the organic SEO result is still ranking high on the first page of Google.

 

This is BrightBid’s PPC Ad for our search term BrightBid which is ranked at the top of Google on the first page. It has ‘Ad’ next to the URL and is our PPC ad.

 

And here is our organic result which is at position 2 on Google on the first page underneath our ad. We do not pay for this and is our ‘free’ link.

 

What we recommend

We recommend that it is worth our customers spending on their own brand terms only when their competitors do. Your competitors may do this to try and divert customers to their websites. Unfortunately, this is a common tactic especially in B2B marketing when search volumes are low and there are not many people searching for the broader category.

BrightBid recommends the following to our customers:

1. Only spend on Brand PPC when competitors bid on your search terms.
2. Turn it off when no competitors are bidding so searchers click on your SEO links.

You can do this manually but you need to be pretty responsive on checking your brand terms as your competitors may choose this tactic intermittently and sporadically when budgets allow so it can be hard to keep checking all the time.

BrightBid use our AI to scan competitor bids on your search terms and automatically turn on brand search only when competitors bid on your terms and not when they don’t. We’ve tested this tactic across many businesses and categories and it always results in a lift in SEO traffic and new customers and a saving of search budget.

Any downsides?

Having used this tactic for a few high growth businesses there is one major downside. It makes your Paid Search ‘Cost Per New Customer Acquisition’ look high as it removes the lower CPC (Cost per Click) and higher converting brand terms in the search account relying on the more expensive, and lower converting, generic keywords.

That’s great for driving new customer acquisition as after all, brand terms simply capture demand from pre-existing awareness built elsewhere but harder to explain to the board, investors or non-Search experts.

Solution

One solution is to start to present blended SEM (PPC + SEO) numbers to wider team members before you try this and measure the result from this new baseline.

Our customer Moneypenny: the call and live chat experts used this tactic to drive 8% more SEO traffic whilst saving 15% of their digital spend already assigned to PPC.