@tjrobertson52

Should you run Google Ads or should you do SEO? I started talking about this in yesterday's video, but this is a common misconception. A lot of people have this idea that if you run Google Ads and do SEO, you're competing with yourself, and I just want to talk about why that's not the case.

Now, of course, the primary goal of Google Ads and SEO is the same. It's to show up in Google search results. And so it makes sense that a lot of people ask me if I'm already ranking in the organic results, why would I also pay to show up in the sponsored results?

This is a natural concern that you're gonna end up paying for a click that you would have gotten anyways if you weren't running ads.

If you don't know, when you run Google ads, you pay about two to five dollars every time someone clicks on the ad. However, think about this from the perspective of the searcher. Someone searches for your product or service and Google immediately shows them sponsored results.

About 20% of users are going to click on one of those sponsored results. The rest are either going to scroll down to the organic results or they're going to perform another search.

That's the key point to understand. They're either going to click on a sponsored result or they're not. So if this user is part of the 20% that clicks on a sponsored result, it really doesn't matter how you're ranking organically.

The only way to get that click is to run Google Ads. And conversely, if that user scrolls past the sponsored results and go straight to the organic results, it doesn't matter if you're running Google Ads. The only way to get that click is to rank organically.

Now how this looks does change a little bit with AI Search results, but the core principle is the same. If you don't know, in AI Results, the sponsored ads are still clearly labelled. In that case, many users will still ignore the ads, but others won't.

The main difference with the AI Response is that many people will see the organic response and the ads. So in that case, ranking organically can also prove the likelihood that someone clicks your ad or converts after clicking your ad.

I will have to see how ads and AI Responses evolve. There might be an argument to make in the future where if the model is already clearly recommending you is the top choice, a significant number of users might choose to click your ad instead of just googling your business.

As it stands right now, you're rarely competing against yourself. With one exception branded searches. If someone searches for your brand by name, chances are they're gonna scroll past the ads cause they're looking specifically for your website.

So in that case, a lot of times they are going to click on a Sponsored result when they otherwise would have gone to your organic result.

With that in mind, it seems obvious you shouldn't run ads on your own brand name. But there is something else to consider. If your competitors are running ads on your brand name, you might be losing clicks to.

Typically this happens when the user doesn't realise they're going to your competitor's website. They've googled your name, they click on the first results, and they assume they're going to your website. The good news is, because your website is so much more relevant for your brand name, you have to pay a lot less per click than they have to for those terms.

In that situation, the best decision isn't quite so obvious, but my recommendation is just to check if Google is showing ads on your own brand's name. And if they are, it's probably worth spending a couple dollars a day to protect it.

The main point I'm trying to make though, is you shouldn't be trying to decide between Google Ads and SEO. You don't have to pick one or the other. In yesterday's video I talked about whether or not Google Ads is worth it for your business.

I'll do another video on whether or not SEO is worth it for your business.