I personally know the teams at many large ecommerce businesses that each spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on paid search advertising.
It's common for these retailers with billions in online revenue to struggle to justify spending single digit millions on SEO.
What makes it worse is they're not wrong.
For too long SEO has been unable to justify significant spends because they've been unable to connect the spend to the results, or to answer the question "what would you do with another $1m?".
Paid search gets budget and attention because it is a performance channel:
![[PUBLIC] SearchPilot Webinar_ Making SEO a performance channel for ecommerce](https://www.searchpilot.com/hs-fs/hubfs/%5BPUBLIC%5D%20SearchPilot%20Webinar_%20Making%20SEO%20a%20performance%20channel%20for%20ecommerce.png?width=750&height=422&name=%5BPUBLIC%5D%20SearchPilot%20Webinar_%20Making%20SEO%20a%20performance%20channel%20for%20ecommerce.png)
I put together a talk covering the material that digital leaders need as they make plans for the organic search channel. At most of the large retailers we speak to, organic search is:
- Their largest channel for new customer acquisition
- Their biggest opportunity
- Their least-understood channel
If your job involves budgeting for, planning for, or executing SEO plans for large ecommerce sites, then this talk will be relevant to your interests. I've included both the video and the slides below:
Watch the video:
If you'd rather just read the slides (bearing in mind that they were designed for presenting rather than reading).
Check out the slides:
(Or download the PDF version to send to colleagues or for clickable links)
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What you'll learn:
Why paid search budgets are so much larger than organic budgets
Are ecommerce businesses right to spend so much more on paid search than on SEO even when there are more total organic clicks out from Google than paid clicks?
My view might surprise you.
How SEO teams can turn additional budget into incremental results
Too many SEO teams struggle to answer the question "what would you do with additional investment?" and very few have convincing answers to the obvious follow up "what results can the business expect if we spend more on SEO?".
What digital leaders can expect from their teams as the channel matures
We encounter a lot of large ecommerce and retail businesses where organic search is their biggest channel for new customer acquisition, and yet it remains the least understood.
We'll discuss what it looks like when the team understands their channel.
