If you’re an e-commerce business owner, you’re probably at least somewhat familiar with Google Ads and Meta Ads. While digital ads have the potential to bring in traffic to your website fast and expose your products to a range of potential customers, they can get very expensive very quickly. The good news is that there’s a smarter way to generate free traffic to your site, lowering your ad spend over time. It’s called SEO, and today we’re breaking down how it can make your marketing dollars stretch further.
What is SEO?
Let’s start from the top. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s the digital practice of optimizing the content and structure of your website to improve its ranking on Google.
What is ranking? As the adage goes, “The best place to hide something is on the second page of Google." That’s what we want to avoid. SEO helps your website rank higher, ideally in the top 10 search results. This exposes your website to anyone searching for keywords relevant to your brand or products.
How Does it Work?
Google has just about every public webpage in existence at its disposal. Its job is to show its users the pages that are the most relevant to what they’re searching for. It does this by evaluating the quality and relevance of each page based on several key metrics, including:
- Keyword usage
- Page speed
- Mobile optimization
- Website structure
- Backlinks (other sites linking to your site)
- Original, informative, relevant, high-quality content
- User experience
The optimization of all these elements falls under the umbrella of SEO. Depending on how optimized these features are, your website will rank higher for search terms on Google.
How SEO Helps Reduce Ad Spend
With Google Ads, you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. If you’re running a Search campaign that puts your website at the top of search results, you’ll pay every time someone clicks on your Search ad.
On the other hand, SEO brings in traffic without you having to pay for every click. This free traffic is called “organic traffic,” as opposed to “paid traffic” generated through ads. Since you're not renting ad space from Google when your website appears near the top of search results, organic traffic is completely free. More free traffic means you can cut back on your ad spend to achieve the same results you would otherwise need to spend thousands of dollars to get.
The 70:30 Rule
The benchmark to aim for is 70% organic traffic and 30% paid traffic. If more than 50% of your traffic is coming from paid ads, that’s a sign you need to reevaluate your SEO strategy.
Think about it this way: If all of your traffic is being brought in through paid ads, you’re totally reliant on paying your monthly ad spend fee to bring in customers. If you decide to stop your Google Ads, your traffic will drop off completely. If there's an error with your account or payment method that goes unnoticed for a day or two, such as an expired credit card, you'll lose out on all the traffic (and revenue) you missed during your downtime.
Meanwhile, if you’ve effectively implemented SEO to generate organic traffic, you’re already getting a solid amount of visitors without having to pay for ads. With SEO as your foundational traffic driver, paid traffic is more of a supplement rather than the bulk (or entirety) of your website traffic.
Once you improve your organic traffic generation, you can most likely reduce your ad spend to achieve that 70:30 split.
One-Time Setup
Paid ads require constant optimization, refinement, and monitoring, in addition to the ad spend you're already paying. This amount of effort pays off in terms of specificity and control, ensuring your ads reach the right people. However, you're committed to continually maintaining your ad account as long as your ads are live.
Meanwhile, SEO work is frontloaded, requiring a major one-time setup executed at the very beginning of your project, paired with strategic webpage updates over time. This makes SEO more time- and cost-effective compared to paid ads, especially for small business owners who conduct their own marketing efforts.
Higher-Quality Visitors
With the right SEO implementation strategy, your website can reach people at every stage of the sales funnel, whether they’re just browsing options or conducting thorough research about which service or product is the best to meet their needs. SEO achieves this automatically, unlike paid ads, which require setting up ad groups, campaigns, and allocating a budget to target specific niches within your market.
Long-Term Results
Paid ads stop working the moment you stop paying. Meanwhile, SEO continues working in the background, even after your initial implementation. This is because Google continually indexes the pages on your website and evaluates your authority (how trustworthy your site is). The more time Google has to become familiar with your website, the more it trusts it.
Simply put: The earlier you implement an SEO strategy, the stronger it becomes over time.
It Reduces Google Ads Cost Per Click
Improving your SEO by creating relevant, high-quality pages and content positively impacts your Google Quality Score, a metric that influences the cost per click in Google Ads. A higher Quality Score means your ads will rank higher and you’ll actually pay less for each click. In other words, SEO implementation can directly improve your Google Ads spend.
Why Should You Invest in SEO?
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
The same can be said for SEO, which is a long-term strategy that requires time to grow. The earlier you start thinking about SEO, the better your website's authority will be over time, the more Google will trust your content, and the better your rankings will be.
Organic traffic is the foundation on which other traffic drivers, including paid ads and social media marketing, should be built. Having a solid organic traffic base puts less strain on your other marketing efforts and frees up valuable resources for other business efforts.
Partner With a Shopify Marketing Agency
SEO and paid ads go hand-in-hand, and both are necessary for a fully optimized, holistic marketing strategy. If you’re a Shopify business owner interested in learning more about SEO, get in touch with our team at Good Commerce.
Check out our work and learn more about our SEO services.