eCommerce SEO vs Paid Ads: What to Prioritise First

For many eCommerce businesses, marketing can be a challenge due to limited budgets and a whole lot of competition. Every pound matters to them, so much so that many businesses need to choose between the many available channels to get more customers. Most of the time, it comes down to eCommerce SEO vs paid ads, as these are the biggest and most effective channels to boost your online visibility. Some will tell you that SEO is best, while others will urge you to use paid ads, but there isn’t just one solution that works for everyone. It all depends on your goals, budget, timeline and current situation.

The differences between eCommerce organic vs paid traffic

When looking at eCommerce organic vs paid traffic and deciding on the best one for your business, you need to understand what makes them different. Each offers unique benefits to improve your online presence and bring traffic that turns into sales.

What eCommerce SEO does

SEO for eCommerce is optimising your website content with specific keywords, which are the terms your audience is searching for. This allows you to rank on the results of search engines when customers are looking for products, solutions or advice. Search engines like Google use specific signals from your website to determine where to rank you, and the aim is to gain page 1 and that top result. Adding in specific keywords that relate to your business, audience and local area, such as “running shoes for men”, “best brands for women’s clothes”, and “tool store near me.” Using these sorts of terms helps you to rank higher and build authority with Google.

Before you can make the decision of SEO or PPC for eCommerce, you need to understand what SEO does. It’s a lot more than just putting keywords into your content on your website. It helps to create an organised and structured website that search engines can crawl, index and trust. Without this proper structure, your site can struggle to rank because Google can’t find relevance to rank you. This means that you need to work on the technical performance, content relevance and authority of your site. Focus on load speed, mobile usability, informative descriptions, useful content, optimised product information, backlinks and brand mentions to boost your rankings and gain more traffic. SEO does take longer to show results, around 3 to 6 months, but it pays off over time and constantly improves if you regularly work at it.

What eCommerce paid ads do

Paid ads work differently from SEO, so it’s important to understand them when choosing SEO or PPC for eCommerce. These allow you to buy visibility, rather than earn it, through display ads of your products. Google Ads and social media advertising, like Meta, instantly display your products when you bid on keywords or target a defined audience. This means that every visitor you get comes at a cost. For example, if the click price is £2 and you get 500 clicks, you’ll spend £1000 even if those visitors don’t convert. However, a huge advantage of this channel is how quickly you can market your products and gain visibility. It’s perfect for launching new products or quickly building a good cash flow due to how quickly paid ads work.

Paid ads show results instantly and bring a lot of traffic to your site. Due to the speed of this channel, it’s something that can be used to test and optimise products and find the right audience for you. It’s also a channel that’s easy to target certain audiences and grow your online visibility. But, because you pay for every click, traffic can instantly stop as soon as you stop paying.

eCommerce SEO vs paid ads: Which is better?

Weighing up eCommerce SEO vs paid ads to see which is better is difficult because it’s all dependent on your situation, goals and budget. Both channels are great for building brand awareness and acquiring new customers. SEO takes longer at the beginning to show results, as it focuses on earning rankings organically through targeting key terms that your audience is searching for. Once you start earning rankings, the hard work that’s put in to get you there pays off because it continues to give you traffic for free.

Paid ads are best for urgent goals that need to be achieved quickly. This is because visitors can come from a campaign within just a few days, and sometimes, it can bring conversions that quickly too! The channel works perfectly for product launches, promotional offers, revenue increases and message tests.

We can benchmark your eCommerce organic vs paid traffic to show you which one is best for you, and which will bring the highest ROI. Get a free report now.

Should I do eCommerce SEO or Google Ads?

Many brands wonder, “Should I do eCommerce SEO or Google Ads?”, and there’s no straightforward answer to this. It all depends on your situation, goals, budget and audience because these factors will determine which channel works best for your business. However, truthfully, there isn’t really a PPC vs SEO for online stores comparison of which is best because the most successful marketing strategies use both SEO and PPC. When you combine both of these channels, they complement each other really well and can help improve your online visibility, traffic and conversions massively.

They work together right from the beginning because your paid ad campaigns can kickstart your visibility journey while your SEO is building. Paid ads can bring instant results to give you revenue right away, and then as SEO starts to take hold, you can gradually reduce your ad spend. As well as this, your SEO data can help direct your paid ad strategy because it can spot high-converting keywords that you can use for your paid ads. When using them together, you can end up dominating search as you get to rank organically and run ads to gain a lot more search results. This means more users see your site, more traffic comes to you, more conversions occur and you start to build trust.

When to invest in SEO first

As using both channels is the best way to increase your online visibility and gain more traffic that turns into conversions, the question is which one do you invest in first? For SEO, there are multiple reasons to invest in it first, depending on where your business is at the moment. Some of the key reasons to invest in this channel first are:

• Having a small budget: If you have a small budget that can’t afford monthly ad spend, SEO can be the best starting point. It only needs an initial investment, but then it becomes a lot more cost-effective over time.

• You need long-term brand authority: Choosing to rank organically can show Google authority and build it. SEO results grow over time, which means that what you create now will end up bringing traffic to you for years.

• Your sector has low competition: If you’re in a niche market that has less competition, SEO can be a bit quicker to get you ranking.

• You have the time: If you have a long sales cycle and have the time to wait for SEO to work, starting with it first is best. This is because many customers research companies thoroughly before choosing where to buy from. SEO helps to build authority and trust, and people trust organic results a lot more than ads.

When to invest in paid ads first

There are also certain situations where investing in paid ads first pays off for your eCommerce business. The key situations for this are:

• You need leads or sales instantly: If you need revenue within the month you’re starting your marketing strategy, then PPC is best to start with. This is because you can launch a campaign and get results within a matter of days, which is a lot quicker than SEO.

• Your sector is highly competitive: Being in a highly competitive market can make it difficult to compete with SEO, especially when you're up against big brands. PPC can help to level the playing field because your ads can appear next to your biggest competitors.

• You want to test a new product or audience: Paid ads are great for testing messaging and targeting an audience in days, rather than months. You can get immediate feedback on what works for your customers.

• You have time-sensitive offers: Paid ads can be beneficial to use first if you have time-sensitive offers and can’t wait for SEO to work. PPC lets you control the timing accurately.

How to implement both

Since a successful marketing strategy isn’t a case of SEO or PPC for eCommerce, and it’s about using both together, you need to know how you can implement both channels to improve your visibility, traffic and conversions. If you can’t afford to start both at the same time from the very beginning, you can take a phased approach by starting one first and the other later on.

Typically, it’s best to start by focusing paid ads for quick wins, spending most of the budget on this channel and only a small amount of the budget on SEO to start building the base. Focusing on paid ads means launching targeted campaigns to gain instant revenue, so that you can start bringing in money while building your SEO foundation. With the small amount of budget for SEO, you can start fixing vital technical issues, optimising existing pages and creating around 4 to 6 quality content pieces.

After this, during months 4 to 6, you should split your budget in half and use 50% on PPC and 50% on SEO. This allows you to still carry on successful ad campaigns and improve conversion, while focusing more on SEO by getting more content out, starting backlink building and monitoring your rankings. From months 7 to 12, you need to start focusing more on SEO than your paid ads. Spend about 30-40% of your budget on paid ads and focus on retargeting, awareness and seasonal campaigns. Then, with 60-70% of your budget, allocate it to SEO to expand your content, create strategic links and build authority, letting you slowly reduce your ad spend as organic traffic grows.

Once you hit 2 years, you need to fully reduce your ad spend and only allocate 20 or 30% of your budget for paid ads. This means that you should only run strategic campaigns, while the majority of your budget will go to SEO to maintain the rankings you’ve earned, expand your reach and turn leads into sales.

Don’t know whether to choose SEO or PPC for eCommerce?

We can help you know which channel to invest in first through our in-depth review. Our team look at your current channels and creates a priority list for free!