The SEO Budget Maths

Let’s do some maths:

I got a client extra 11.8k visitors for a given period from SEO

My client is paying at the moment 0.45 cents of a USD per click they obtain from Google Shopping Ads.

The new extra 11.8k visitors value is:
- 11.8k x 0.45 cents = 5.3k USD extra profit per month

Might not seem much but this is just the last 28 days.

Growth was aggressive and it will continue growing for a while. Best part is, upgrades are done we do not need to keep “upgrading“.

Job is done, we are moving to other SEO areas but profit keeps piling up.

They already got the SEO win: being positioned on high-intent and profitable rankings.

With SEO growth can be exponential. With ads you need “exponential“ money and that does not exist. Tomorrow with no ads budget there is no business.

My client still invest 5 times more on Ads than they do in SEO. Yet SEO is the best way to run profitable ads…

That is what I want to discuss today.

📖 Glossary
- PPC: pay per click. It the best way to be visible to potential buyers via search ads across all search platforms like Google (search results, shopping, Youtube, email, etc)

The strangest budget conversation I keep having

Most brands come to me with a solid market and a good positioning. Yet when I look at SEO and PPC balance I still see the same after 12 years:

$50K, $100K, $1M a year poured into PPC without hesitation.
Yet when SEO comes up, every penny is questioned.

PPC budgets are often 5 or 10 times SEO budget

Why SEO feels expensive (even when it isn’t)

I get it.

Ads/PPC feel safe because ROI shows up fast.
(Even that ROI being bad, it’s about seeed)

SEO feels messy because it touches infrastructure, content, crawlability, and technical debt you can’t see on a dashboard tomorrow morning.

SEO won’t show on tomorrow profits but without it you will have a less profitable future as business. Search Ads is like SEO taxed.

The problem is this: you’re measuring SEO like an expense instead of leverage.
And that misunderstanding quietly drains revenue every single month.

Technical SEO influence on PPC performance

Here’s what most teams miss:

💁‍♂ When organic visibility improves, paid performance improves too.

Higher organic trust signals lower CPCs = better profits

How Tech SEO impacts PPC:

Better crawlability ensures better rankings
Better organic rankings increase brand recognition
Brand recognition increase click ratio (CTR)
Higher organic CTRs reduce the need of high PPC budgets

While doing SEO you improve long-term ROI on 2 fronts: organic & paid.

In the “zero-click“ era we keep growing traffic from Google with high purchasing intent:

Case study example: Structured data + Enhanced Merchant Center feed helped to score more enriched results and more qualified traffic.

Traffic still grows from Google

In practice, SEO doesn’t compete with PPC. Both channels elevate each other.

Pierre Herubel puts it well:

SEO can grow exponentially, PPC can’t

💁‍♂ The most effective PPC optimization I see today isn’t a new bidding model.
It’s fixing the SEO issues underneath the site.

More organic visibility is higher profits and better ROI from ads. All wins.

A simple way to invest “zero“ on SEO and still grow your organic search

If you’re running a large eCommerce site and spending $50K–$500K/month on performance marketing, there’s a strong chance technical SEO issues are silently taxing every campaign you run. Maybe you do not want to invest “more“ in SEO so here is a small budget trick:

💁 Budget tip: take a portion (10-15% or at least 4-5k) out of your PPC campaigns and put it to SEO. This way your total budget stays the same but you are one step ahead on search marketing.

If you want, let’s review your technical SEO together and identify what’s costing you revenue right now.

Just reply “Technical SEO check up for better profits“ and we’ll set up a call.