With retail CPCs due to rise in Google and Meta, now is the time to invest in SEO
SEO in the Brand vs Performance Marketing Debate
There’s a huge debate raging on LinkedIn with some brilliant minds debating the brand vs performance question. To summarise the discussion very crudely, investing in brand unlocks long-term brand growth, while investment in performance marketing drives short-term gain at a better return on ad spend initially, but diminishes over time.
So, how do you wean off your reliance on short-term performance marketing to give you the headroom and budget to grow your brand?
For most brands at the moment, there isn’t more money in the budget, and the board is demanding growth. So, how do you do it? This is where most brands miss the fact that SEO is also performance marketing with a few very important distinctions:
- Great SEO typically has the best new customer acquisition cost at 1/10th that of paid search if done well (I’m talking non-brand SEO here)
- SEO is incremental, so investments made now will result in continual benefits for years to come
- SEO performance is not necessarily dependent on seemingly endless tech platform changes
- Great SEO helps your brand in ALL search experiences, whether Google or a host of LLMs and AI search. They all rely on your product category and content to be optimised and accessible, and external brand signals that help you rise above the competition
Where does the budget come from?
A brand with a turnover of more than £50m could easily carve a small percentage of their paid budget (typically less than 2%) into a solid SEO programme to meaningfully reduce their reliance on paid search every month. This creates a positive cycle of investment into SEO growth, resulting in paid efficiency and unlocking more brand investment. It’s the same budget that’s getting more and more efficient over time and reducing your reliance on paid search.
Win win win.
Doesn’t my agency do this already?
Well, it depends on the agency. If you have paid and SEO with the same search agency or it’s with a network agency, this conversation is absolutely happening, but most likely you’re not in the room when it does. This isn’t a paid vs SEO debate for me, it’s how you do both in a sustainable and transparent way to deliver the best results for a client, not the best results for the agency’s bottom line. This is why I firmly believe you need a specialist agency in SEO, and to actively facilitate great discussions between agencies to understand the best approach for your brand.
But SEO is hugely complex, isn’t it?
It can be, but it doesn’t have to be. SEOs fixate on making things more complex than they need to be. They also spend far too long fixating on what a site doesn’t have, rather than hustling or focusing on what it does have.
For example, every retailer has product categories and products. And you can unlock brilliant growth by creating a trade-aligned SEO strategy that works hard to make sure you rank for the right thing at the right time. We literally built our entire tech stack to allow us to do this collaboratively with our clients, at a scale that creates brilliant growth.
Why can’t you just do this in-house?
You probably have teams and agencies doing this already, but all SEO tools have monthly data. This means teams are slow to react to market shifts. It also means they’re most likely focusing on the wrong category at the wrong time, and planning using the same data your competitors are using. It also means that SEO is outside the weekly trading hustle most retail brands operate in, and very rarely part of the insight conversation.
Our proprietary tech platform, Metis, gives the MediaVision team and our clients weekly data that allows us to be front and centre from a market insight and activation perspective. With trends, competitive markets, erratic weather, and rapidly changing consumer behaviour, it’s never been more important for SEOs to react fast and first. It’s this focus on optimising what you HAVE as a retailer and not what you DON’T that sets MediaVision apart.
Yes, we look at foundational tech elements, but most platforms do a decent job these days, and where there are issues, there are often workarounds that unlock growth. SEO can be a predictable growth engine at a very low cost per new customer acquisition and an exceptional ROI.
How does this help balance your paid and SEO investment?
We also have unique tech to help balance the overlap between paid and SEO. We don’t focus where paid is very profitable (although brand bidding is a point for a later post) we focus on where paid search isn’t profitable AND we rank well for SEO – you can either divert this spend to more profitable areas of paid search, invest in brand or bank it to help EBITDA.
How can I measure my brand metrics to help justify this shift in spend?
Well, we have the technology for that too, which allows you to measure your brand share of search against competitors, weekly. If you look at our recent fashion sector report, you can see a small glimpse of the data our clients, get weekly, and you’ll see why understanding your brand share of search vs your competition every week is incredibly valuable.
If you’re frustrated with the growth from your SEO channel and want to reduce your reliance on paid it would be great to chat.
