The integration of this change with Total Search strategies, including technologies like Incubeta’s Seamless Search, presents a new way for managing and optimizing search visibility and budget efficiency.

Impact on SEO

This change is great news if you’re good at SEO. If your website is well set up and easy to find, you might show up higher in Google without having to pay for ads. It means you should really focus on making your site as good as possible – think about the right keywords, great content, and making it nice for people to use. If you do this well, you could get more from your investment, because being seen in Google won’t just depend on how much you spend on ads. Plus, people tend to trust regular search results more than ads, so this could make your site look better to them.

Impact on PPC

If you use PPC, you need to think a bit differently now. With regular search results possibly showing up before ads, your ads might not be as visible as before. This means you might have to change how you bid on keywords and which ones you choose. It could also mean that you need to be smarter about how you spend your ad money, keeping a close eye on the ‘top’ and ‘absolute top’ Ad metrics in Google Ads will be important to understand the impact of this change.  You should try to find a balance between paying for ads and making your site better organically, so you’re not just competing with yourself for space on Google.

It will be interesting to see the true impact of this change, will it now be possible to be top in organic and use your paid ad to push down your competitors organic listings? It remains to be seen how well you could leverage this to your advantage to get the best of both worlds, but one thing is clear – it’s more important now than ever to manage PPC and SEO in relation to each other and not necessarily adopt an “always on” or “always off” strategy when it comes to high volume organic terms in paid.

Total Search

Total Search is a holistic approach to managing both paid and organic search strategies to maximize visibility and efficiency across search engines. Incubeta’s Seamless Search technology plays an important role in this new environment by allowing advertisers and marketers to manage and optimize their paid and organic search efforts in tandem. Seamless Search provides insights into the performance of both channels, helping to identify where to allocate budget to achieve the best possible return on investment. By understanding when paid search is necessary to compensate for lower organic visibility or when to reduce paid spend in favor of strong organic performance, marketers can ensure that they are using their budgets most effectively.

Using Seamless will allow you to find the optimum point of production on every keyword, on each device, each day. With this change perhaps that may mean there is now opportunity to reduce some bids to drop down below organic, saving money without making much impact to revenue. Perhaps for some it may mean increasing bids to get back above a competitor’s organic listing. By leveraging both your PPC and SEO data in conjunction and the Seamless machine learning algorithms, you can have confidence you are making the optimum decisions to get the most out of all your work improving your Organic rankings and not wasting ad spend.

Google letting organic search results show up higher than ads is a big change in online marketing. It shows that you need to use both SEO and PPC together to get the best results. Tools like Incubeta’s Seamless Search will be really important for figuring out where to spend your money to get the most out of your investment in online marketing.