Is your PPC strategy sabotaging your SEO? Keyword research 2.3 million

We analyzed ~2.3 million keywords With ~4.99 million top ads to see how often companies advertise using keywords if they already have organic rankings in the top 10 positions.

Here are some of the key statistics:

37.9% of advertised websites are already in the top 10 organic search results for the same keyword. This means that a significant portion of companies pay for ads once they have visibility for that term.

When browsing specific pages rather than entire sites, 15.7% advertised URLs have an organic ranking in top 10. This shows that even at the page level, ads often appear on content that already ranks high.

Impossibly, 40.66% pages that are advertised in the ranking Number 1 organic. Basically, these companies pay for the top ad placement on Google once they are already ranked number one in organic search results.

Another surprising conclusion from our research is that… 51.09% In many cases, companies will advertise a site that is in the top ten, even if there are no competing ads there.

This suggests that many companies may be displaying ads unnecessarily, generating costs by not competing with other advertisers.

This overlap between paid and organic services raises two vital questions.

Are companies simply trying to dominate the SERPs, or is this a sign of lack of coordination between SEO and PPC teams?

And, more importantly, does showing ads on search results for keywords that are already ranking well generate significantly more clicks, or does it simply inflate the cost per acquisition?

We found answers to these and several other questions among the comments we received on LinkedIn (Here AND Here). Here is my attempt to summarize the discussion:

• Utilize PPC selectively: PPC campaigns should only supplement organic rankings for highly competitive keywords or those that are pushed down the screen by ads. Avoid unnecessary expenses where organic visibility is already sturdy.
• Measure revenue impact, not vanity metrics: Go beyond clicks and CTR. The true measure of success is incremental revenue.
• Think through PPC for branded keywords: PPC for branded terms often adds little value if you already rank well organically. Change this budget to another one unless you are facing direct competition.
• Eliminate isolated strategies: PPC and SEO should work together, not against each other. For example, you can apply PPC to test different types of content for a keyword you’ve already ranked for (thanks for the idea, Ollie!) or apply it to rank for variable keywords (like HubSpot does).

In one of the comments Nikolas Garfinkel joint research carried out in a similar field. Blake, Nosko, and Tadelis conducted a series of large-scale experiments to assess the impact of paid search ads on branded and non-branded keywords on eBay in 2014.

They concluded that for established brands, displaying ads based on branded terms was largely unnecessary. Results for non-branded keywords were similar: most of the clicks attributed to ads would happen organically anywaymeaning the return on investment (ROI) from these ads was negative. This aligns with our findings that companies often compete with each other by paying for clicks they could get for free through sturdy organic rankings.

A huge thank you to everyone who contributed with their comments!

If you would like to conduct similar research on your website, you can apply our Site Explorer tool. Enter your domain, go to the Organic Keywords report and apply the SERP feature filter (set it to Target Positions and Top Ads).

Final thoughts

Marketers need to evaluate their PPC and SEO strategies together. Are you really adding value by advertising for a keyword you already have a presence in, or would that advertising money be better spent elsewhere? Maybe it’s time to sit down with your PPC and SEO teams and revisit your overlapping efforts.

Do you have any questions or comments? Share them in this thread or allow Tim (author of the study) or I know.