With over 80% of consumers flocking to the Internet to read reviews, to find information and ultimately purchase something, it is important, more than ever before, that your business is easily found online. Poor or no exposure at all can make your business obsolete.
It does not matter if you have the most awesome service or product if people cannot find you via search results on Google or any other search engine for that matter.
Fortunately, there are a few ways to dominate the online landscape and the most popular ones are SEO (search engine optimization) and Google AdWords or PPC (pay per click).
How are your Google Ads Campaign going?
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The idea is to have an understanding on how a continuous investment in PPC, for example, Google Ads will have a sizeable impact on leveraging long term organic growth.
What Is the Difference Between Organic Growth and Google Ads?
Before we are able to achieve this understanding, the key lies in finding a distinction between the two components of organic growth and Google Ads.
Organic growth or more commonly referred to as Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimising a website to achieve the best ranking in organic search results on search engines such as Google.
Google Ads
Image: Google ads
The organic search results that appear on top are highly relevant to search and Google recognises the website as an entity having high authority. You cannot pay to place a website on top in organic results. Several months of continuous work on the website and a select set of keywords can help you achieve organic rankings.
For a website to rank organically, it needs to have relevant content, a good reputation and should be easily readable by the Google bots.
Google Ads, on the other hand, is a platform that is run by Google, allowing companies or brands to advertise their website at predesignated screen positions along with relevant search results.
Advertisers pay-per-click on the advertisement and the ads show on the very top of the search results pages – higher than the organic search results – and on the sides.
Google Ads basically lets you cheat.
How?
SEO is a long term process. You cannot expect to see results instantly. It may take six months or even up to twelve months and more in some cases to show you results. Whilst Google Ads lets you jump to the #1 position, that can only happen if you play your strategies right.
But everything said and done, Google Ads is a lot like renting a gorgeous apartment situated in a prime location where the heart of traffic is. But, once your lease is over, it is gone. Poof!
So, the smart thing to do here is to harness the power of Google Ads to reach your target audience when they are looking for your product or service. In the meantime, use that power to complement your efforts in search engine optimization.
Whilst SEO will help boost your website’s organic rankings and enhance your overall website, Google Ads will get the word out of the specials, boost traffic and make sure that your ads show for competitive keywords.
How Long Does It Take to See PPC Results?
Can 3 months of investing in Google Ads help in leveraging long term organic growth – this key question needs to be answered first.
3 months is enough to see PPC results and understand if your campaign is actually working. Generally, the first month is all about gathering data and increasing visibility. Of course, you can also expect instant wins.
The second month is about refining the keywords to improve conversion rates and reduce the amount of wasted spend with the help of updating the negative keywords list, ideally on a daily basis.
Creating a negative keywords list will make your Google Ads more targeted and make sure that they are only visible to those who are actually interested in your product or service.
The third month is usually about pushing the boundaries of the campaign by adding more keywords and bringing in traffic from untapped markets.
Of course, you can continue to invest in PPC beyond 3 months, but this is a good window to judge whether your campaign is working, or you need to change tactics.
Steps to Setup a Google Ads Campaign
Step 1: Keyword list creation
Based on your company’s goals, you can use specific or general keywords. You can use long-tail keywords to tailor yourself to the targeted market. If your business only operates in certain areas, you can use geo-targeting in your Google Ads campaigns and select keywords based on your geographic location.
Trouble coming up with keywords? Use the Google Ads keyword planner tool to get ideas.
Google Ads Campaign
Image: Google ads keyword planner
Once in the keyword tool, type a list of keywords that you want to use. This will generate ideas.
Image: Keyword ideas
Click search and Google will give you a list of keywords to browse through, along with the competition level of the keywords, global monthly searches, local monthly searches and approximate CPC.
Inclusion of negative keywords
Like we mentioned earlier, negative keywords enable you to remove or exclude specific keywords from your campaign. Your ad will not be shown in search results for these words.
keywords
Image: Negative keywords
Step 2: Creating an ad campaign
Enter Google Ads and click on ‘create your first campaign’.
ad campaign
Image: Creating an ad campaign
Decide on the type of campaign that you want to run, such as:
Default: Ads appear on both Google Display Network and Google Search Network. This is great for quickly increasing CTR and is visible to a large number of potential consumers.
Display Network Only: Ads appear on Google Network Display’s websites including partnering websites such as Gmail and YouTube.
Search Network Only: Ads appear on search results in Google and relevant websites that are a part of the Search Network including Google Images, Maps, AOL and Shopping. This gives you more control on how, where and when to position your ads.
Display Network Only (Remarketing): Ads are shown on the display network to potential consumers who have visited your website already. This helps in reaching out to people who have shown interest in your product or service in the recent past.
Search and Display Networks (Mobile Devices): Ads will show on tablets and mobile devices.
Image: Mobile devices
Location & language
Next, decide on the geographic location and language of your ad. This will help to optimise your ad further and make it highly targeted.
Location & language
Image: Choosing geographic location
Networks & Devices
Customise the devices (laptops, desktops, tablet devices or mobile devices) and networks (Search Partners, Google Search, Display Network and so on) that you want your ad to be displayed on. If you choose default campaign settings, you can personalise it later as per your preferences and requirements.
Networks & Devices
Image: Networks
Bidding & Budget
When it comes to choosing a bidding option, your decision can be based on the following:
Set bids for each click
Allow Google Ads to set bids so that clicks are maximised within your budget
CPC (cost per click) that charges you only when someone actually clicks on the link
CPM (cost per thousand impressions)
CPA (cost per acquisition) is when you are charged when a person who clicked on your ad converted to an actual buyer
Now, Let’s Take A Look at How Google Ads or PPC Influence Your Organic Results
As you must already know, PPC or paid ads does not affect organic rankings directly. Google actually has a real wall between the organic side and paid side.
However, there are indirect things that is beyond the control of the search giant. This causes organic search and paid ads to have a point of intersection. The scope of the leverage between the two platforms is of paramount importance here.
The likelihood of searchers (who see an ad) clicking an organic listing is high
Various studies including some conducted by Google itself shows that those searchers who see an ad are more likely to click on an organic listing.
Even if your ad is not being clicked the first time, it is still influencing the behaviour of the audience. Just by seeing an ad, the audience is building a familiarity with your brand. So, the next time that they see your ad or even a search result listing, they are inclined to click.
Moreover, when the audience sees ads from the same company is also appearing within organic listings, their behaviour changes. They start to trust the brand and wish to know more.
So, yes. In an indirect sense, Google Ads help to increase the ranking position of your organic listings. In turn, it leads to increasing the amount of organic traffic that you get from Google.
What we have come to realise in so many years is that on an average, paid searches get somewhere between 2% and 3% of all the clicks, of the total search results in a paid click. As for organic, it is somewhere between 47% and 57%.
The increase in the number of searches each year means that there is no huge loss in organic traffic, but only relying on organic will not propel brands to the top. A successful search marketing strategy must involve both organic and paid search.
So that, when organic slows down, paid search speed up. Basically, when one channel shrinks, the other grows and vice versa.
So, it is important to remember that there are many other searches where there is an absence of paid clicks and there are several searches where paid actually gets a lot more of the traffic.
For instance, if you are searching for bedroom décor and you can see on your desktop or mobile how Google has rich image ads and you can view a selection of different styles amongst them. You can sift through a myriad décor option. Then, you will find ads that are below that, the normal paid text ads and after that, way down, you will find the organic results.
Probably, somewhere between 25% and 50% of all the clicks are going to the paid search results of this page, which is massively biasing the click-through rate.
This means that if you bid in certain specific cases, you can change the click-through rate curve for the overall SERP and also change the CTR opportunity for a particular keyword or keywords.
Why are users more likely to click on paid search results?
The answer is surprisingly simple – users are typically seeing paid ads before the organic search results in addition to the Google shopping results. As they lack the patience to scroll, they click on the first or the second option that catches their eye.
Image: Paid search results
Additionally, if users are using their mobile devices to search, almost none of the search queries will show anything else other than the paid ads, unless users decide to scroll down.
Image: Paid ads on mobile
The marked improvement in CTR with paid search intuitively makes sense due to the following reasons:
More ads per query
Ads serving on more queries
Larger ads, with more space given to each ad
Subtler ad labelling, making it less obvious that an ad is an ad
As you know, organic search CTR’s increase will not just bring more traffic, but also improve ranking of your keywords and by extension the website.
After all, CTR is Google RankBrain’s primary factor to determine whether a website deserves higher rankings.
High geographic performance
There are several categories to Search Engine Optimization and one of those is local Search Engine Optimization.
Local SEO is the process of targeting potential consumers near any brick-and-mortar establishment that you may have.
A majority of the Internet users make use of their tablets and smartphones to look for information, specifically geared towards places and services near them. And a high percentage of local searchers result in sales on the very same day.
Don’t have a physical location? You can still leverage the power of local SEO by using your geographic data from Google Ads to boost regional, national or international SEO campaigns.
You can find your geographic performance in Google Ads, along with information like, conversions or revenue, impressions, clicks and CTRs.
Image: Geographic performance
Once you have that data, you can make use of Google Trends to find out the kind of words or phrases being used by people to search for products or services of your industry in those specific locations.
You can also get an idea whether those phrases or words are shrinking or growing in popularity. Then, use that information to enhance your on-page SEO, as well as, refine your keyword targets.
Make use of Display Network audience information
Backlinks are considered to be a powerful off-site SEO factor. However, building links can be a real challenge and that is where Google Display Network data comes to the rescue.
If you are running display ads, you can make use of that information to find effective and powerful link building opportunities to boost your site rankings.
You can get an idea of the performance of your ads on the different websites that they have been displayed on at the ‘Placements’ report.
Image: Display network audience information
You can sort the performance result by conversions or clicks. If there are entries that look promising, you need to click through to the website and find out if the site has an engaged audience that can benefit your business.
If everything looks good, reach out to get a backlink from the website, through guest blogging or other link building methods.
This process helps in finding relevant and high-authority websites to build links from. And it paves the way for you to get most out of your PPC data!
In Conclusion
Google Ads does not directly impact organic results. But, 3 months of investing in a paid campaign will fetch you enough data to develop a better plan targeted towards increasing your organic growth.
SEO does not give quick results and it is a long term game. Before SEO results come into full swing, you can run Google Ads to boost your organic results albeit indirectly. From getting plenty of traffic to driving conversions and even sales, paid ads will give you a competitive edge.
Watch: How a 3-Month Google Ads Investment Fuels Long-Term Organic Growth
For Curious Minds
Organic search growth, or SEO, is the process of earning visibility through high-quality, relevant content, which builds your website's authority over time. Unlike paid ads, you cannot buy top organic rankings; they are the result of a long-term commitment to building a credible and valuable digital asset. Google Ads, in contrast, offers immediate placement at the top of search results for a fee.
This distinction is crucial for budget allocation and expectation management. A strategy that relies only on PPC is like renting a storefront; you lose all visibility the moment you stop paying. A purely SEO approach may take six to twelve months to show significant results, which can be too slow for new businesses. A balanced strategy uses the immediate traffic from Google Ads to generate leads and gather keyword data, which then informs and accelerates your long-term SEO efforts, creating a powerful, self-reinforcing cycle. To explore how to create this synergy, a deeper look into campaign integration is required.
The pay-per-click (PPC) model of Google Ads grants instant visibility by placing your website at the top of search results pages for specific keywords you bid on. You only pay when a user clicks your ad, making it a direct method for capturing high-intent traffic precisely when they are looking for a solution. This immediacy is its core advantage over the slower, cumulative process of SEO.
Its effectiveness comes from precise targeting capabilities that connect your offerings to active consumer needs.
You select keywords that match user search queries, ensuring your ads appear to a relevant audience.
Campaigns can be refined with negative keywords to exclude irrelevant searches, reducing wasted spend.
You gain immediate feedback and data on which search terms convert best, allowing for rapid optimization.
This direct response mechanism allows you to test offers, promote specials, and drive traffic for competitive terms while your long-term SEO strategy matures. Mastering this tool requires understanding how to turn clicks into conversions, which the full article explains in greater detail.
The primary trade-off is between immediate traffic and long-term asset building. Google Ads delivers fast results and valuable market data but requires continuous investment, while SEO is a slower, upfront investment that builds a lasting digital asset and drives compounding organic growth over time. Your choice depends on your business's immediate needs for cash flow versus its long-term goals for brand authority.
Consider these factors when allocating your budget:
Speed to Market: If you need to generate leads or sales immediately to prove a concept or fund operations, Google Ads is the superior choice for its speed.
Long-Term ROI:SEO typically offers a higher return on investment over a period of 12 months or more because organic clicks are free and build trust.
Competitive Landscape: In highly competitive markets, PPC may be necessary to gain any visibility at all, while SEO can help you carve out a defensible niche.
A blended approach is often best: use Google Ads for initial traction and keyword research, then reinvest profits into a robust SEO strategy. The precise balance of this mix is a key strategic decision that the full content helps clarify.
Successful companies demonstrate that an integrated approach creates a powerful flywheel effect, where each channel strengthens the other. By running Google Ads, a company like Prime Retail can immediately appear for high-value transactional keywords, capturing users ready to buy. Simultaneously, the data from these ads, such as high-performing keywords and ad copy, provides invaluable insights to refine their long-term SEO content strategy.
This synergy works because it addresses the entire customer journey. A user might first see a PPC ad for a '24-hour flash sale,' make a purchase, and later search for 'how to use product X,' finding an organic blog post from the same company. This dual presence builds brand recognition and trust. For instance, Prime Retail can use PPC to test the appeal of new product messaging quickly, then incorporate the winning language into their website's meta descriptions and page titles to boost organic click-through rates. This strategic integration ensures they are visible at every touchpoint, a concept explored further in the complete analysis.
Comparing Google Ads to renting is apt; it provides immediate, high-quality traffic but offers no equity. You can, however, use this 'rental' traffic to build your long-term, owned asset by converting paid visitors into a loyal audience. The key is to direct PPC traffic not just to sales pages but to valuable content assets that encourage repeat engagement.
Here’s how to transition from renter to owner:
Capture Leads: Use paid traffic to drive visitors to landing pages with compelling lead magnets, such as ebooks or checklists, to build your email list.
Promote Core Content: Boost your best-performing blog posts or guides with PPC to earn backlinks, social shares, and brand recognition, all of which are strong SEO signals.
Gather Keyword Intelligence: Analyze which paid keywords result in the highest engagement and conversions, then prioritize those terms in your organic content strategy to rank for them naturally.
By reinvesting the value of your paid traffic into assets you control, you transform a temporary expense into a lasting competitive advantage. The full article provides a deeper guide on making this strategic pivot.
A structured three-month Google Ads plan is essential for turning initial ad spend into actionable intelligence for your long-term SEO. This initial period is less about profit and more about accelerated market learning. The goal is to identify winning keywords, understand user intent, and establish a baseline for conversions.
Here is a practical three-month roadmap:
Month 1: Data Collection & Visibility. Launch broad campaigns targeting a wide set of relevant keywords. Focus on maximizing impressions and clicks to gather as much data as possible on what resonates with your audience. Track everything from click-through rates to time on site.
Month 2: Keyword Refinement & Optimization. Analyze the data from month one. Pause low-performing keywords and double down on those driving conversions. This is when you aggressively build your negative keywords list daily to eliminate wasted spend on irrelevant searches.
Month 3: Scaling & SEO Integration. With a refined set of high-converting keywords, increase the budget for profitable ad groups. Simultaneously, hand this proven keyword list to your SEO team to create dedicated content and landing pages designed to rank organically for those exact terms.
This approach ensures your initial ad investment directly fuels a smarter, more effective organic strategy. Learning how to interpret this data correctly is the next step detailed in the full guide.
Building a negative keywords list is a critical, ongoing process for improving campaign efficiency and targeting accuracy. It works by preventing your ads from showing for irrelevant search queries that include your keywords but signal the wrong user intent. A methodical approach during the first two months is vital for maximizing your budget's impact.
Follow this systematic process for optimal results:
Pre-Launch Brainstorming: Before your campaign goes live, create a foundational list of obvious negative terms. If you sell 'premium photo software,' you might add negatives like 'free,' 'jobs,' or 'tutorials.'
Daily Search Term Report Analysis (Month 1): During the first month, check your Search Term Report every day. This report shows the exact queries that triggered your ads. Identify and add any irrelevant queries to your negative keyword list immediately.
Refine and Group (Month 2): In the second month, you will have more data. Look for patterns in irrelevant searches and create themed negative keyword lists (e.g., a 'competitor names' list or a 'DIY' list) that can be applied across multiple campaigns to streamline management.
This disciplined routine ensures your ads are only visible to the most qualified potential customers. The complete article offers more advanced techniques for mastering this crucial aspect of PPC management.
The relationship between PPC and SEO will become more deeply integrated, with search engines increasingly rewarding brands that provide a consistent and authoritative user experience across both channels. Paid search data will become an even more critical leading indicator for predicting organic trends and user intent shifts. Relying on one channel alone will become a significant competitive disadvantage.
To prepare for this future, your business should focus on a unified search strategy:
Centralize Data Analysis: Stop analyzing PPC and SEO performance in silos. Create a central dashboard to see how paid click-through rates for certain headlines might inform organic page titles or how high-converting PPC keywords should guide your content calendar.
Focus on Topic Authority: Use broad PPC campaigns to identify entire topic clusters that resonate with your audience, not just individual keywords. Then, build comprehensive SEO content around these proven topics to establish your site as an authority.
Optimize for User Experience: Both algorithms prioritize user experience. Use PPC landing page tests to find layouts and calls-to-action that engage users, then apply those learnings to your core organic pages.
Adapting now means building a holistic search presence that is resilient to algorithm changes. Discover more about future-proofing your strategy in the full article.
Exclusive reliance on Google Ads creates a fragile business model with significant long-term risks. Your visibility is directly tied to your ad spend, making you vulnerable to budget cuts, rising ad costs, and competitor bidding wars. This approach fails to build any lasting digital equity, meaning your market presence vanishes the moment you stop paying for ads.
The key long-term implications are severe:
No Compounding Growth: Unlike SEO, where value accumulates over time, PPC offers no compounding returns. Each month's traffic must be bought anew.
Erosion of Trust: Savvy consumers, especially the 'over 80% of consumers' who research online, often trust organic results more than paid ads, viewing them as more authentic endorsements by the search engine.
Lack of a Defensive Moat: A strong organic presence is a competitive barrier. Without it, any competitor with a larger budget can instantly displace you from the top of the search results page.
Neglecting SEO means you are perpetually 'renting' your audience instead of building a direct relationship. The full content provides a framework for balancing short-term needs with the vital goal of building a durable brand.
The most frequent error is treating the campaign's end as a final stop rather than a strategic pause. Businesses often fail to harvest the rich performance data generated by the campaign, effectively discarding a valuable roadmap for their organic growth. This data on high-converting keywords, effective ad copy, and user behavior is a powerful asset for your SEO strategy.
To avoid this mistake and sustain momentum, a stronger approach is needed.
Archive High-Performing Keywords: Before pausing, export a list of the keywords and ad groups that drove the most conversions and had the highest click-through rates. This list becomes the priority target for your SEO content team.
Analyze Ad Copy Themes: Identify the messaging and value propositions in your best-performing ads. These proven hooks should be integrated into your website's organic meta titles, descriptions, and on-page headings to improve organic click-through rates.
Review Landing Page Performance: Pinpoint which paid landing pages had the best engagement rates. These pages offer a template for what works with your audience, guiding the design and content of future organic pages.
By treating PPC data as a strategic asset, you ensure your ad spend continues to deliver value long after the campaign is paused. The full guide offers more ways to bridge the gap between your paid and organic efforts.
A well-executed Google Ads campaign directly solves the primary frustration with SEO, its long timeline to show results, by providing immediate traffic and leads. It acts as a bridge, generating business results in the short term while your long-term organic strategy matures. More importantly, it functions as a powerful research tool, de-risking your SEO investment.
Here is how PPC accelerates your organic success:
Instant Keyword Validation: Instead of waiting six months to see if a keyword will be profitable, Google Ads can tell you within weeks which terms convert into customers. This allows you to focus your SEO efforts only on commercially viable keywords.
Audience and Offer Testing: You can rapidly test different ad copy, offers, and landing pages to see what resonates with your target audience. The winning combinations provide a proven formula for your organic content.
Competitive Intelligence:PPC allows you to appear alongside competitors immediately, providing insight into their messaging and strategies that you can then counter with your SEO content.
This approach removes the guesswork from SEO, ensuring your content efforts are focused on what is already proven to work. Discover how to structure these tests for maximum insight in the complete analysis.
For a new product launch, PPC's speed is unquestionably more impactful in the initial phase. You need to generate immediate awareness and test market response quickly, which SEO cannot provide in the required timeframe of weeks or a few months. A launch without an initial paid push risks failing due to simple obscurity.
However, a balanced six-month plan is crucial for sustained success.
Months 1-2 (Launch): Allocate 80% of your search budget to Google Ads. Focus on driving traffic to your new product pages, testing messaging, and acquiring your first customers. Use this period to gather data on the most effective keywords and audience segments.
Months 3-4 (Analyze & Build): Shift the budget mix to 60% PPC and 40% SEO. Use the keyword data from your ads to begin creating foundational SEO content, such as detailed guides, blog posts, and comparison pages that target the proven search terms.
Months 5-6 (Scale & Transition): Aim for a 50/50 split. As your initial SEO content begins to rank and generate organic traffic, you can start to scale back the PPC spend on certain keywords and reallocate it to new areas, creating a more cost-effective and resilient marketing engine.
This phased approach uses PPC for the initial sprint and gradually builds an SEO foundation for the long marathon ahead. The complete guide details how to manage this transition effectively.
Chandala Takalkar is a young content marketer and creative with experience in content, copy, corporate communications, and design. A digital native, she has the ability to craft content and copy that suits the medium and connects. Prior to Team upGrowth, she worked as an English trainer. Her experience includes all forms of copy and content writing, from Social Media communication to email marketing.
Growth Strategy and Planning
