Should I run ads? Or should I spend the ad money on creating high-quality SEO content and article instead?
Running ads vs writing SEO articles – Our small experiment
Those who follow me know that I experiment a lot with different forms of passive income.
I create mini-projects and allocate a maximum monthly hourly time contribution to each project depending on their nature. I try to automate as many aspects of the business as possible and usually hire a part-time VA to answer the emails.
If I see potential in the business, then I will increase my hourly contributions and invest more time and resources to make sure it expands.
For one of my online e-commerce mini-projects, I decided, in the long run, not to spend money on ads, and spend that money on hiring writers instead to get organic traffic via good SEO techniques.
My plan was to stop my Google ads and switch to organic content writing instead. Obviously creating articles takes time, and the best practice is to introduce your new SEO articles to your website at a slow rate, otherwise, Google’s algorithm will think you’re trying to spam their indexing algorithm. Not going to go through technical analysis to keep this article simple.
The SEO vs Ads experiment
I allocated 10h/ month of my personal time to this project. That included everything from hiring to employee communication, etc. I tried sticking to around 10h/month.
I hired a full-time writer for 6 months, from the Philippines (Who understood this sector), and paid her $600 / month. Whilst still running Google ads.
Our writer would publish 2x articles for the first 4 weeks, and then increase to 3x articles for the next 4 weeks, and then keep it between 3-4 / week.
We started seeing organic sales slowly coming in from the end of month 1.
Additionally. We started building external links from social media websites and a few business directories (Nothing major, just the basics)
The cost of sales through Google ads was at an average of $75 / sales. The CPC for the keywords in this industry is very expensive. That might seem like a high cost per conversion. But our product was priced at $299 with a $150 profit margin and we could also upsell different relevant products in the future to the customers. After the ad cost, the product would return a $75 profit. The Net Profit, after deducting business costs, was around $40 / sales. FYI I didn’t take a salary.
I was spending most of the allocated time on optimising Google ads, and not looking after the business model. I feel Google ads is not a “set and forget” service. You constantly need to tweak your ads and check they’re delivering. Making sure you meet all Google policy requirements and rules etc.
Organic SEO Sales
The average cost of organic sales is calculated as below:
We first calculate the business running costs for that specific month (Includes business fees, software fees, employment fees, including the writer salary, electricity, office space, web hosting, payment system, etc)
We subtract the business cost from the total Organic Sales (Sales that were made as a result of an organic search from a search engine, in our case 80% came from Google)
I will round the cost to keep things simple.
Month 1 – Organic SEO cost per conversion: $550
Month 2 – Organic SEO cost per conversion: $370
Month 3 – Organic SEO cost per conversion: $640
Month 4 – Organic SEO cost per conversion: $310
Month 5 – Organic SEO cost per conversion: $260
Month 6 – Organic SEO cost per conversion: $160
From month 7, we no longer had a full-time writer. Our writer was now providing 1x article/week at a cost of $160 / month. We decided to keep up the article writing as Google loves fresh content on your website, and we were starting to see results.
Month 7 – Organic SEO cost per conversion: $90
Month 8 – Organic SEO cost per conversion: $50
Month 9 – Organic SEO cost per conversion: $70
Month 10 – Organic SEO cost per conversion: $20
Month 11 – Organic SEO cost per conversion: $30
Month 12 – Organic SEO cost per conversion: $20
By the end of Month 12, our Net Profit on each sale was around $130
Our organic sales volumes were however not sufficient to keep a “proper business” afloat.
After all, I was not taking a salary, and the business costs were very low. If I had paid myself a salary, the costs would definitely be much higher.
So should I invest my Google ads money in writing articles instead?
This experiment has proved that publishing high-quality SEO content will in THE LONG TERM give you tremendous benefits and advantages.
SEO articles are a one-off investment that will continue generating income for years to come.
The older the article is, the lower it’s the cost of conversion. After several years, the cost of conversion for some articles will go down to almost ZERO. You’re technically getting FREE TRAFFIC!
In comparison, when you pay for traffic, e.g. via Google ads, once you’ve spent your money, you do not benefit any further from that investment (Apart form re-marketing campaigns, which you could also apply to your SEO traffic)
I would combine both paid ads, and SEO articles at the beginning. It’s going to take a while for your SEO articles to gain traction.
I will also use re-marketing campaigns (Google/ Facebook / etc), to re-target organic visitors who haven’t purchased yet. Re-targeting campaigns are the cheapest form of advertising, as you already HAVE your audience. You don’t need keywords or complicated ad campaigns.
On our 6th month, our average cost of conversion for our re-marketing campaigns was around $20 / sale, compared to $75 / sale for a first-time audience.
If you have zero budget but have free time, then you can start writing articles for your business on a weekly basis, and you will get increased traffic.
You can even start writing articles before having a product, and use affiliate links on your articles to earn money.
Make sure you’ve done proper keyword research for every single article. Use tools such as SEMRush, Yoast SEO and Moz, to create articles that your audience is searching for.
In summary, if your product is offered at a low price (e.g. less than $100), with a 30% profit margin, it is a more economical investment in a long term SEO content plan, as opposed to trying to get sales through paid ads.
If you have a product with a high price, and a massive profit margin, then consider running ads.
Run ad trials on a limited daily budget to make sure you understand what your conversion cost is. If you’re making a profit, then keep the ads. If you’re making a 50% profit through ads, then maybe don’t even worry about creating SEO content, and focus on optimising your ads instead.
A final note, MAKE SURE you’ve set up your ad tracking codes properly.
Make sure your Google Analytics and console are set properly. Make sure you have all the re-marketing /pixels/ and tracking codes installed on your webpage.
I use Google Tag Manager to organise and manage my tracking codes.
This was a very brief article, if you would like a Part 2, with updates, and more in-depth pieces of information, please leave a comment, and I will write an update article in a few months.