How to Balance Your Budget with SEO and PPC

To budget for SEO and PPC, put more of your spend into PPC while your site is new, then shift it toward SEO as your organic visibility grows. PPC buys traffic and leads right away, while SEO builds rankings and AI search visibility that keep paying off without a per-click cost.

Treat the splits below as starting ranges, and move budget toward whichever channel brings in qualified leads at the lower cost.

Short-term strategies: More PPC

Financial split: 60% – 75% PPC, 25% – 40% SEO

When you’re just starting your Internet marketing strategy, your website is a blank slate. It doesn’t have anything holding it back, but it doesn’t have anything working to its advantage either.

PPC

That’s why it’s critical to use PPC in the early stages of your website’s life. PPC lets you pay to display in the search results for certain keywords that are important to your industry. So instead of relying on the strength of your website to bring traffic, you can rely on your marketing budget instead.

Basically, this is the time you want to flood your PPC campaigns with funds to make sure you’re getting the traffic that you want. If you can’t afford to keep your PPC campaign active at all times, find and designate the key hours of the day when you get the best traffic. Then, run ads only during those hours, or set a daily cap and let automated bidding pace spend.

This bare-bones approach to PPC may not provide as much traffic or cost as much money, but it’s a strong first step for your campaigns. As you grow, you can add more money to your PPC budget, and that’ll continue to return a high ROI.

Learn more about budgeting for PPC in the video below.

SEO

As your PPC is bringing in new traffic, you should be working on the beginnings of your SEO strategy. That includes creating ideas for content, creating that content, and publishing it on your website. It also includes learning link building techniques, so you can start to earn credibility in your industry.

The content you create will show visitors to your site that you’re a reliable authority in your industry. It’ll also show Google that you’re an active online presence, so they can recommend you in relevant searches. Clear, well-structured answers give AI tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews something to cite, too.

The links you acquire at this stage of your strategy form the backbone of your search engine credibility. Every link you get is a vote of confidence that tells Google and other search engines that you’re a source of quality, interesting content. And when you get those links from other reputable sources, your SEO strategy will thrive.

Long-term strategies: More SEO

Financial split: 25% – 40% PPC, 60% – 75% SEO

As you earn better search engine visibility and rankings from SEO, you can rely on PPC less and less. So instead of paying for the traffic that you get to your website, you now get it for free from your reputation with search engine users and search engines themselves.

PPC

In this phase, you can scale back on your PPC efforts and only target the highly-competitive keywords in your industry. That will help you save some money while you still enjoy the same (or greater) traffic levels as before.

In addition, you can now use your PPC campaigns to target potential keywords for online expansion. So if there were keywords that you wanted to target earlier, but you didn’t have the budget, you can start doing it now. This is a great way to spearhead initiatives into new search engine territory, getting you more traffic from different sources to help your business get even stronger.

SEO

By this point, your website should be strong enough to stand on its own two feet. It should have links from other websites, and it should rank well in search engines and appear in AI Overviews for keywords and search terms that attract customers. However, you should constantly work to maintain and improve those rankings by taking your SEO strategy to the next level.

With a strong foundation of high-ranking content, you can now expand your SEO reach by repeating the process from earlier. Create new ideas, turn them into content, and publish them on your site. As you continue to repeat this process, you’ll create even more opportunities for your site to display in search engine results.

The key to successful SEO is to continue producing fresh, new content and obtaining links to it from other sources. That way, search engines can see you’re active, users get something valuable from your creations, and your company can continue to grow.

Ongoing strategies: Shift budget by revenue, not clicks

The SEO and PPC splits above are starting ranges, not fixed rules. Once both channels are running, review the split every month and move budget toward the channel that produces qualified leads and revenue at the lower cost. These steps keep that review grounded in results:

1. Connect leads to revenue. Track which campaigns and pages produce leads that become customers, not just form fills. RevenueCloudFX, WebFX’s platform for measuring how marketing campaigns drive revenue, integrates with your CRM so you can compare SEO and PPC by closed revenue instead of clicks.
2. Shift PPC spend toward what converts. Move budget from underperforming ads and campaigns to your top converters, by hand or with Google Ads’ Recommended Investment Strategy, which can reallocate existing spend to top-performing campaigns. As part of a broader PPC and SEO program, PaulB Parts shifted budget toward its top-converting ads and saw a 150% year-over-year increase in ROI.
3. Count AI search visibility as SEO value. In WebFX’s study of 2.37 million U.S. keywords, 25.8% of queries showed a Google AI Overview. Organic work now earns citations in AI answers as well as rankings, and those placements don’t always show up as clicks, so measure them before you cut SEO spend.
4. Move budget in small steps. SEO takes months to compound, so shift a portion of spend at a time and give each change a full review cycle before making the next one.

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WebFX knows SEO and PPC

At WebFX, we help businesses decide where SEO and PPC budget should be invested, adjusted, or scaled, based on which channel is driving revenue. Our team of experienced specialists is constantly on the move to make sure that we can earn the best ROI possible for our clients — and we want to do the same for you!

With an extensive portfolio and client testimonials to back us up, we’re confident that we’ll meet your expectations and deliver the superior results you need to grow your business online. Contact us today to lay out the SEO and PPC plans that’ll make it happen!