Are You Over-Dependent on Google Ads?
If you're spending 10× more on PPC than SEO, and you've been in the market for 3+ years, you're almost certainly over-dependent on paid.
Look at your investment in Google Ads over the last year (ad spend plus management) and compare it with investments in SEO. Does the distribution make sense?
Key facts to consider:
- 32.2% of U.S. users use ad blockers. If you rely only on PPC, you are invisible to 1/3 of people.
- NN Group study shows in great detail that many people learned to skip past the ad presented at the top of the Google search results.
- Visibility in tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini strongly correlates with organic visibility. If you only show up in Google Ads but not in the content and sources AI tools rely on, you simply don't exist in those conversations.
SEO can give you much stronger, more diversified visibility that builds trust in your brand - without needing to feed the Google beast every month just to keep your pipeline alive.
I get it. Your paid ads are profitable. You need leads and sign ups now. But what's your long term plan?
In my experience, too many companies get used to shoveling money into Google Ads and lose sight of the long run.
A balanced approach that leverages both immediate results from PPC and long-term growth from SEO will provide the most resilient marketing strategy.
That's why we believe paid and organic should live under one roof, with a single strategy that focuses not just on growth, but on your independence - building the in-house processes and skills so you're not at the mercy of a single ad platform.
Do you have a plan for how to take the best from paid and start improving your organic visibility to reduce your dependency on paid channels, build sustainable traffic sources, and capture those users who actively avoid ads?
If not, a simple first step is to map the parts of your pipeline that would disappear tomorrow if you turned off Google Ads - and then choose one area to start building an organic alternative.
