Can Paid Search Targeting Brand Keywords Kill Your SEO?

[djbaxter]

Paid Search Targeting Brand Keywords = SEO Death
by Andrew Shotland, Local SEO Guide
July 31, 2018

About two years ago I posited Is Your Adwords Campaign Hijacking Your SEO Traffic? The answer of course was “yes.”

We just got a new client that hired us because their organic traffic had started tanking, but when you looked at the data in Google Search Console, it only showed brand queries were tanking. And said tanking started pretty much when the paid traffic started increasing.

We did some back of the envelope calculations on SEMRush CPC data available for their brand queries and we calculated this client is spending an additional $20,000/day to buy $50,000 in revenue. This isn’t such a bad deal until one considers that until the increase in paid search traffic, the client was spending ~$0 to achieve that revenue. So their margins just took a 40% haircut.

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