If you’ve been leaning on paid ads to generate more traffic for your business, why not just stay the course? Why bring in search engine optimization–especially given all you’ve heard about it being slow. Why wait months for leads from SEO when you can generate them lightning fast with paid ads?

The truth is, it’s harder than ever to generate leads with paid ads. The eCommerce field was already crowded when COVID opened the door for even more advertisers to enter the fray. Beyond that, privacy concerns (think Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework and Google’s crackdown on third-party cookies) have made it very difficult to target the right audience with your ads and to track and attribute traffic.

As eCommerce competition and privacy concerns continue to escalate, it’s more important than ever to diversify your strategies for reaching qualified leads at different stages of the buyer journey. As PPC gets more complicated and expensive, SEO for funnels provides a prime way to bring in highly qualified leads with less money and hassle.

While “above the fold” advertising on search pages is subject to “banner blindness” or “ad fatigue,” organic search results get more traction because they’re considered more trustworthy.

The average click through rate for Google Ads is roughly 2%. By comparison, check out these 2022 click-through rates for first page organic search listings:

✅ Position 1—39.8%

✅ Position 2—18.7%

✅ Position 3—10.2%

✅ Position 4—7.4%

✅ Position 5—5.1%

The SEO advantage is further supported by research from BrightEdge, which shows that organic search drives 53% of all web traffic while paid ads drive just 15%.

If PPC is like renting a car, SEO is like owning one. A well-optimized website is an asset–your asset–that continues to grow in value. Each new effort piggybacks on the last. More and more people come to know your brand. Trusted websites link to yours. Google recognizes you as an established authority in your industry and rewards your website accordingly. As a result, your site keeps climbing up the search engine page and outranking the competition. In contrast, paid ads disappear the moment you stop paying for them.

Remember the big 2018 Facebook fracas when they got nailed for harvesting data on a huge scale? Privacy concerns have hit a nerve with the public and companies are responding in ways that hurt PPC advertising.

With the iOS 14 update, every app developer has to expressly ask users for permission to track their data, and users can decline with the push of a button. Combine that with Google’s crackdown on third party cookies, and you have a very challenging environment for targeting the right customers.

Without the ability to drill down to qualified leads, you’re more apt to throw money away on people who aren’t interested or ready to buy what you’re selling. Platforms are trying to come up with workarounds, but they’re time consuming and watered down.

Privacy concerns are not going away. According to GetApp/HubSpot*, 41% of marketers say their biggest future challenge will be an inability to track key data points. And faced with current privacy challenges, 44% say that to maintain the same marketing/advertising success, they would need to increase their spending by 5% to 25%.

Nobody asks for an ad to pop up in the middle of their YouTube workout video or to flash on their screen when they’re Googling operating hours for their local supermarket.

In contrast to intrusive, unwanted ads, search engine optimization gives users exactly what they want when they ask for it. If someone wants to know how to find the best deals on used cars or the best investment opportunities, they’ll Google it. Funnels SEO will deliver that answer through a blog, case study, infographic, video, etc. This helps you reach highly qualified leads. It also makes for warmer leads because you’ve done something for them (answered their question) and won their trust.

There’s a common misconception that SEO is hard to track. Not only can you track the progress of your SEO campaign, it’s much easier than tracking ad analytics.

With PPC data, you’re tracking countless data streams. In a perfect world, they’d all be tracked through Google Analytics. Instead, the burden falls to you to set up UTM parameters for:

❌ Each source

❌ Each source’s ad type

❌ Each source’s different ad copy or creative designs

❌ and on and on...

Then there’s the question of whether data is being passed along through each step of the user’s journey. Often, there are leaks.

With organic data, there’s no complicated setup; it’s all there by default in Google Analytics. You can see who visited, how long they stayed, whether or not they converted, etc.