How SEO and Paid Search can work more effectively together

Joining David Bain to discuss how SEO and Paid Search can work more effectively together was Serge Nguele, Barbara Pezzi, Tiago Goncalves, Georgia Bloomberg and Ryan Glass.

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David Bain  

Hello and welcome to the April 2026 edition of the Majestic SEO panel discussing how SEO and paid search can work more effectively together. 

I’m your host. David Bain, and joining me today are five great guests. Let’s meet them, starting off with Barbara Pezzi.

Barbara Pezzi  

Thank you, David. My name is Barbara Pezzi. I’m based just outside London, and I’ve been working in the industry, both organic and paid, for almost 20 years. The easiest way to find me, since my name is quite long, is to Google it, and both my LinkedIn and my website will pop up.

David Bain  

Thank you so much. Barbara, also with us today, is Ryan.

Ryan Glass  

Thank you very much. David. Very pleased to join the panel. Lovely discussion, and I’m looking forward to it. My name is Ryan Glass. I am coming to you live from London, from the offices of Performics. 

I’ve been working in many different forms of digital and performance marketing for 16 years. A lot of time is spent on how we work together more efficiently and effectively across channels.

David Bain  

Thanks for joining us, Ryan. And also with us today is Serge.

Serge Nguele  

Hi everyone, Serge Nguele here from Your PPC Doctor. I’ve been in PPC for over 16 years, and I’m London based, but working internationally. 

The big dream of mine was to really have the two channels of SEO and PPC working together, but in practice, from my in-house or agency life, it’s a dream never happening, but fast forward to today, I’m with Your PPC Doctor, which is not an agency and not a consultancy, it’s a clinic. We’re a PPC diagnostic clinic, where we live by one principle, we diagnose before prescribing.

David Bain  

Thank you, Serge. The next panelist joining us today is Georgia.

Georgia Bloomberg  

Hi, I’m Georgia Bloomberg. So I am a PPC account director at Found, the Everysearch™ agency. I’ve been in the industry for about six and a half years now, predominantly working in paid search, but most recently, over the last three years, one of my biggest, kind of, passion projects, I would say, is really thinking about how SEO and paid search can work together. 

David Bain  

Thanks for coming on Georgia, and also with us today is Tiago.

Tiago Goncalves  

Hey everyone. My name is Tiago. I’m originally Portuguese, from Lisbon, but live in the Netherlands for more than 14 years now. I work as a paid search specialist, but I used to do SEO, and now I’m in paid search SEO and currently working for a big flower delivery network group called Euroflorist, also known as eFlorist in the UK, and yeah, basically, very enthusiastic about the connection between the two fields. 

I also started a small community that turned out to be quite interesting about search marketing here in the Netherlands, which is now over 800 members, and where we share insights on both fields and learn from each other, so you can find out more. If you want to join, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.

David Bain  

Tiago, how would you summarise the difference between paid search and SEO?

Tiago Goncalves  

Even though they might differ, I believe there’s huge similarities, and both aim for the same outcome, which is to be the top result on search engines, with the nuance of having a budget or not having a budget. 

I always argue that SEO also needs a budget, but the major difference is the expectation in the timing you get the exposure. So in PPC you get immediate results by paying for it, what you can see happens almost in real time, whereas SEO is a long term game where the actions of what you do today will eventually show results in the mid to long term. 

I think another nuance is competition. So in paid search, there’s an insane amount of competition most of the time, whereas in SEO, there’s a lot of untapped opportunities that, depending on the angle we choose to rank for, can be real quick winners and low hanging fruits. 

So yeah, I think those are the main factors: competition, the expectation of visibility gains and the time it takes, as well as the real-time results.

David Bain  

Let’s go around the rest of the panel on that one, just very quickly, and perhaps you can pull out just one point that you would emphasise as being particularly different about paid search or the other way around. 

So, Barbara, how would you summarise the difference between paid search and SEO?

Barbara Pezzi  

I think both paid search and SEO aim to focus on the quality in delivering the most relevant content to the users. Essentially, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to get people to land on our page, find the content good, and hopefully do what we would like them to do. 

The difference I find, which is exactly what Tiago said, is that with paid search, you have a little bit more flexibility in terms of the testing. You can test headlines, you can test landing pages, you can test content way faster than you could possibly do with SEO, and also with SEO, the timelines are much, much slower. 

On the flip side, though, there is some advantages on the SEO side of things too. So for example, long tail keywords. Sometimes companies obsess so much on the big queries and those big volume terms, and they may not get there, but there may be a lot of really good, valid long tail terms that may not have a huge amount of volume, but when you try to bid on them on paid search, then Google says there isn’t enough search volume to trigger an ad, especially if you’re trying to do any in exact match. 

So SEO may give us certain opportunities that are not available in paid search. 

David Bain

Ryan, what are your initial thoughts?

Ryan Glass  

I agree with both Tiago and Barbara. I think the sound bite around it would be, do you want to be seen or do you want to be found? 

Paid search is when it’s important that my brand or my page or my offer is seen. Today, I have a moment in the consumer journey. Maybe it’s a limited-time offer. Maybe I understand my activation window, and there’s an action that I want this audience to take today, and I’m willing to put a budget behind it, because the outcomes I’m looking to generate versus when you want to be found on SEO.

This is as Barbara saying, the longer term. Here’s the things that we always want to be known for, and we expect that there’s going to be a sustained volume of people for whom this is relevant, exactly as Barbara said, quality is critical for both. But I think it is do you have that temporal nature in the message you’re trying to get across today?

David Bain  

Superb. Serge, what are your thoughts on this one?

Serge Nguele  

I think yeah, we would only be agreeing while Yeah. In a nutshell, I would say it’s two sides of the coin serving the same mission, essentially, and the mission being, how do the end user get whatever they are searching in the most efficient way?

On paid search, it could be quickly triggered, because there is a budget element where you could activate bid, which was true at the beginning anyway. Now, with the smart bidding, it’s not really that true anymore, but the essence of it is the same, and organically it’s exactly the same. 

What do you do so that when people are searching, you get found? 

David Bain

Georgia, let’s get your quick thoughts.

Georgia Bloomberg  

It’s very, very tricky to go last because everyone has said really great stuff, but I guess, yeah, just building upon that, it’s really about looking at how paid search tends to be more short-term, and SEO definitely is more long-term. 

With paid search, you almost get the immediate reward of actually being able to see that conversion data being attributed back to the work that you’re doing, whereas for SEO, it is much longer term, and trying to distill the value to a client about SEO can be a lot more challenging, which is why, you know, it can be thought that SEO has been neglected up until now, where we have seen this big rise in, you know, AI overview and like, how people are searching is changing, and how important SEO is in this day and age. 

So, yeah, I think it’s really about finding that nice middle ground between both the short term and the long term, and where those two channels actually can work more effectively together.

David Bain  

Serge, we talked about this beforehand, what is Quality Score and how does it impact SEO as well as paid search? 

My background is probably more SEO than paid search. I’ve done a little bit of paid search in the past, and I’m aware that Quality Score is something that obviously Google applies to individual ads when they look at how well and relevant the ad is, so the title, the description, the landing page and the keyword phrase that you’re targeting as well. And there’s always been a bit of a discussion in terms of whether or not SEOs can utilize the data and perhaps utilize the same landing pages as paid search.

So how would you summarize the way that Quality Score operates now, and how can an SEO utilize the data found within that?

Serge Nguele  

So, travelling back in the history of how SEO was working at the very beginning with all the keyword stuffing. The picture I would use is as a shop owner being asked who’s the best shop in the street. So of course, he will say it’s it’s me. That just makes sense, and that’s the keyword stuffing technique. Back in the day, they were just saying, This is where I want to appear, even though you were not legitimate on it. 

Fast forward on PPC, and when I did my first talk at brightonSEO on Quality Score, it was, “Is Quality Score Dead?”. I would like to think the introduction of Quality Score was really a revolution. I still think so in the search landscape, because it was introducing a quality element where, okay, it’s not anymore. I have the budget and I can be top of page. It would be rather, am I answering with the three criteria, relevant landing page and the expected click through rate? So that’s been in the first place Google, because they are the one who introduced this. Were anticipating, if you bring in your ad, how likely is that art to serve someone searching? So it’s a that’s for the history and it’s still the same. 

When AI came into play, I was just saying on that talk, I was saying quality score was applicable only on search with the trick criteria, however, and also because the main element on it was the bid, really. So it was a finally, reward system. It was a barometer, giving you an indication across three criteria. So it’s a score from 1 to 10 across all the different relevant landing pages and expected click through rate. So it was giving an element of control. So you having a picture, how likely which of the criteria you activate to meet the end result. And bid were important there when we had really an impact on it. 

Back in the day, it could be instant, so you could just increase your bid and see the result, and then automation came into it, so we had less control over it. And fast forward, how I connect personally the two, it’s the same logic. It’s essentially what I would call quality satisfaction in the age of AI. So when I was concluding my talk on quality score, I said quality score is applicable on PPC paid search. However, I was anticipating that the logic could be applicable across all the channels. So the rational Google was using for quality score back in the day is the same use today to surface on AI overview.

Georgia Bloomberg  

Just to add on the back of that, I actually ran a really interesting test regarding quality score and landing page relevance a couple of years ago now, where, essentially, we had a client who didn’t necessarily believe in the value of SEO, and didn’t really understand why having a content strategy was important, and the website that they did have desperately needed optimization to improve, to essentially just improve how it was ranking organically. 

One test that we ran was looking at comparing the unoptimized landing page and then the optimized pages, which essentially related back to the keywords we were targeting on paid search. So with those keywords where we those, we had the SEO optimized pages, they tended to have a stronger quality score because of the fact they had the keywords that were relevant to what we were bidding on. 

When we ran that test, what we saw is the is the fact that the SEO optimized pages drove a stronger conversion rate and also an uplift in conversions. It essentially enabled us to prove that you do need these SEO optimizations to take place in order to improve the quality of your paid search performance.

So there’s definitely, when it comes to quality score and SEO and paid search, that crossover that does happen, and as someone who works in PPC, part of my scope and my work is making sure that I can help prove the value, and essentially help sell each other. 

Ryan Glass  

I was just going to build on what Georgia was saying. I think exactly one of the opportunities that we have in working together between SEO and paid search is to still look at Quality Score, even though there’s more advanced metrics related to outcomes within paid search that we can definitely look to for specific campaigns. 

Quality Score can still be a great metric for unifying and uniting the work, and truly, as Serge said, leaning on the quality aspect of it. How are the different channels able to do their jobs exceptionally well, but make sure everybody’s marching in the same direction? How do we rein in where we have potential pivots in strategies, or shifting budgets between campaigns and content, and have an assessment that says we know that we want to be known for this type of thing. We have a strategy around where we want to appear. 

The Quality Score is talking about a grade on how well we are appearing for those things where we want to show up. And when we do this work, we’re then rewarded with greater efficiency on both teams. 

And I absolutely love what Georgia was just sharing about the outcomes where they were even impactful for the business. So not just how are we expanding reach against the existing budget, but how are we then growing that because we’re driving success for the business as well.

David Bain  

Barbara, would you like to add some thoughts on quality score and what SEOs can learn from paid search because of it?

Barbara Pezzi  

We’re old school and we’ve been there a long time, so I’m always a big fan of Quality Score. One of my obsessions, and it saddens me a little bit these days, is so many PPC campaigns just abandoned with the algorithm doing all of the bidding and all of the work, and, to be fair, the algorithm doesn’t necessarily always think about Quality Score. The algorithm thinks about, all right, let’s get some money for one side or the other without making too many comments about it. 

I think, though, David, there is definitely overlap in the sense that we want quality user experience, both from an SEO perspective and the PPC perspective. But I do also agree that sometimes it may be easier to have separate PPC landing pages, simply because, let’s say, from a from an SEO perspective, or even from a branding perspective, there may be certain terms that brand the branding team will not let you have on on the page, or there are only so many terms that you can have on a specific landing page from an SEO perspective, and then building, if we are really focusing on the quality score, then we do want those terms to be present in the landing page. 

And then, as such, it does make sense to create, in some circumstances, dedicated landing pages that also may have a completely different design than what’s needed from an organic perspective, or from a branding perspective, where the two can work together. I think this goes beyond Quality Score and just getting insight from the paid side of things, of what terms Google consider to be good quality, then those learnings can potentially be incorporated in the SEO strategy. 

But I don’t think that the landing pages necessarily always need to be the same for organic and paid.

David Bain  

Tiago, I’d love to take that last point that Barbara made about landing pages not necessarily always needing to be the same for paid search as SEO. I think that’s a really significant point. From an organic search perspective, you’re just thinking, well, what does that mean? Does that mean I have to no-index or do something to these paid search pages. But then does that do something to the Quality Score to make paid search less effective? 

So what’s your perspective on landing pages and whether or not they need to be the same?

Tiago Goncalves  

It’s a good point. I’ve honestly worked for companies in the past that adopted that strategy where they were constantly like making iterations. So different landing pages to test which one would perform the best through paid advertising, whether if it’s on Meta or even Google advertising, and the fact that indeed it was needed to have a special, dedicated landing page was for multiple reasons.

For CRO reasons, Conversion Rate Optimization, the landing page needed to scream like FOMO, so Fear Of Missing Out and social proof. All of those things are great for advertising, not necessarily, perhaps good for SEO, some of the times these things take a wait on things like page load times and other things. So it could be that the more developed landing pages might also be slower and therefore it doesn’t go with the guidelines of load times that SEO needs to have to make the page rank properly. So yeah, definitely, I think it’s a good, good test.

And with the different landing pages, you can also do something called smoke tests, which is understanding whether a proposition in a specific landing page would resonate with the target audience quickly or not. So by creating a proposition that you don’t know yet if it’s going to work out, and testing it with that, is a quick way to find out if something works or not, without touching the actual pages that need to rank for specific keywords for SEO purposes. 

It could be that you said, David, we might need to no-index such pages because we don’t want duplicate content running around or any other issues. So, yeah, I think that’s definitely a good point.

David Bain  

Does that have a negative impact in any way on Quality Score, or any other aspect of how paid search performance is determined by Google? If a page was no-indexed or if a landing page is no-indexed?

Tiago Goncalves  

I honestly don’t recall an issue, but I do recall issues if you happen to no-index shopping pages. So if we go to a feed and specifically no-index, something that is definitely guaranteed to not show in Google Shopping. So yeah, on Google Shopping, there’s a huge sensitive correlation between structured data, which is the SEO term that everybody knows, and the actual Google shopping feed. So both have to work on Google search. To be honest, I remember running tests on pages no-indexed without any issues or being selected in Google Ads whatsoever.

David Bain  

In summary, would you say there are any key elements that need to be removed from a landing page in order for the landing page to perform more effectively for paid search? I’m thinking of perhaps upper navigation or other elements that are perhaps confusing or unnecessary for the keyword terms that you’re targeting?

Tiago Goncalves  

I think in paid search, a landing page needs to cater to the right intent first and foremost, so that the keywords that we’re getting on need to be present, ideally above the fold even. But to be honest, in paid advertising, we have more liberty to experiment with different elements, such as embedded video and product carousels or eventually embedded reviews for interest pilot or any other review website, because that doesn’t take a tone on on necessarily low times, even though, I have to say there’s a big metric called mobile page score that is available under the Google Ads UI that does play a role in quality score in some ways, but it’s not as critical as if we were talking about SEO ranking.

David Bain  

Let’s talk a little bit about AI and how AI is impacting both channels and perhaps the way that paid search and potentially you would recommend that SEO is done because of the impact that AI is having. Ryan, shall we start off with you on that one?

Ryan Glass  

It’s a really exciting and engaging field, and I’m sure many of us on the panel and many people viewing right now have been having more conversations around AI than you can handle lot of days. But I love that we’re at a stage where we have a lot of really tangible opportunities, both in the US and in the UK and other European markets, as things continue to roll out globally, within the front of paid search and AI, while my understanding is there are a number of beta tests going on within within Google, within ChatGPT and other AI interfaces, primarily in the US and then continuing to go forward around running paid search in the response.

I think one of the things that many of us are curious about is what’s the interaction there for the user who enjoys AI, who’s going for a chat-like experience, and at what point does the user want to click? 

Anyways, right within SEO, we’re already dealing with this in terms of the diminishment of Click-Through Rate and the decoupling of clicks and impressions as AI works its wonders in there. I’m of the opinion that a lot of times this is simplifying what Google used to call the messy middle that users are still coming in in the same moments where they’re treating search as a behavior more than as a channel, there’s these life moments that are driving people to interact with search, but the LLMs and the AI are pushing brand recommendations a little bit earlier in the consumer journey. 

I think it’s going to be really interesting to see how we realize the opportunity for ads that are not intrusive but are helpful to that, because the AI is already training the user that it’s pro-recommending brands that it thinks are going to provide solutions to the outcomes. We all see this right now in the citations and in AIO reviews, in the links that show up already. 

So I think there’s a lot that both paid and organic teams need to be learning from each other in terms of visibility and understanding. What are the elements that a brand can own, what are the elements where brands can influence things? And yes, when those ad opportunities do come up, how do we tap into that in a way that continues to be constructive for the user journey? And I think that’s still a design challenge to be solved to a greater or lesser extent.

David Bain  

Barbara, would you like to pick up on that? I thought Ryan’s thoughts on brand and brand recognition from AI, and I was wondering whether or not it was even more important now to be on top of the game in terms of appearing for as many brand searches as possible in paid search. Is that fair?

Barbara Pezzi  

First of all, I don’t like to give absolutes when it comes to AI, because there’s so many different theories, and even just the whole SEO versus GEO debate, it’s a whole thing, is a whole minefield in itself, let alone once we start adding in the paid search component and and they’re all different theories on, do we need markdown versus not mark down? Do we want to chunk or not chunk? Or, you know, there’s various theories on what’s going on and what isn’t. 

What I believe, is that from an AI perspective, or presence, or topical presence, the brands do really need to focus a lot on the brand recognition, but also go beyond search. So it’s no longer just about having the right keywords or paying the right money to be seen in the ads. It’s about how is the brand talked about in social media, in different sites, is the whole ecosystem of a brand that it becomes way more important when you when it comes to AI inclusions, but then at the same time, I think this is so fast changing, and every week. There is a new article with the new study made on, this is how you do it, and this is how you get there. And I don’t think that right now we have a definite answer. 

What I recommend to my client is still pretty much the same SEO techniques that I’ve always done. It’s to focus on the quality, on building a good network of good quality inbound links on digital PR, a social media presence and from a paid perspective, I haven’t yet had the chance to pay to play with paid ads in AI yet, so I know they been rolled out in the US, but I haven’t got any experience yet, so I can’t comment if on whether they’re proving to be quite valuable or not.

David Bain  

Georgia, I can see you doing a lot of thinking there.

Georgia Bloomberg  

I mean, I think in terms of the thoughts on ads in AI, obviously, we know that the world of search is very quickly changing and shifting. I thinkn paid search, very historically and possibly wrongly, used to be thought of as the very bottom of funnel, low hanging fruit channel. And now what we’re seeing with the way that kind of user search behaviour is changing off the back of how AI is evolving and how people are now searching in sentences, rather than short keywords, which traditionally we would have targeted on paid search. 

We’re also seeing, from how the Google ads platform as an example, is progressing, it’s now also introducing these new AI automated tools like Performance Max, like AI Max, like broad match, which are all campaign types which are positioned to appear and serve ads in AI Overview. 

We know with the US when it was first rolled out there, that it was a couple of months later, where all of a sudden we had AI mode suddenly rolled out within the EU. So, yes, the world is very quickly changing with how AI is Developing. 

Just to relay it back to thinking about how this impacts both SEO and paid, and them working together naturally, these new kind of AI evolving campaign types are very reliant on what we have on websites, and are using that information to help inform targeting. Essentially, it is becoming increasingly important as the world of AI is developing, that these two channels are working together. And this could be, for example, we know for AI max that you can negative out specific URLs to be targeting. Perhaps we know some URLs on the website which are already being organically surfaced in AI overview quite well, and don’t need that traditional don’t need that additional support. Okay, well, how about we look at URLs on the website which don’t, which aren’t being cited in AI overview, and perhaps we can. Use paid to target those websites via AI max. 

So there’s ways of thinking about it, where it like it’s essentially just thinking about incrementally. Where are you going to get those user eyes from? But yeah, I feel I can talk. I can go off on a tangent talking about this sort of stuff.

David Bain  

Serge, how would you take this message that Georgia has delivered and run forward with what are your thoughts on how else AI is impacting the way that paid search and SEO is are working more effectively together on that one?

Serge Nguele  

So I will have the same line, I would say, more than ever, really with AI is forcing PPC, paid search team and SEO team, to really work together and have a holistic view, and even putting a commercial a commercial price tag on it, because the logic is the same. 

What we notice is that the way brand beings cited in AI overview are not necessarily the one with the biggest budget and they are not even necessarily the one with the more more backlink for the organic part, or being the one with the strongest entity establishment. It’s combining really all the channels. 

And what this means, is that PPC work in silo, then they are missing the point, which means for an in-house team, if they are working with different agency, it will be their duty to make sure they are controlling what is being said. 

And this is giving me the opportunity to introduce a framework I’ve developed for measuring satisfaction. The first layer would be what I call the structural clarity. So basically it will be if someone searching can redefine the answer in 30 seconds, and then it will be topical authority. That means they need to be a consistent and original expert content online there then factual consistency is the brand message verifiable online. And this is really going cross channel, so it won’t be SEO or PPC or content in silo or PR, so it’s all of them. 

And then situation worthiness is the other entity referring enough, and then it will be the experience signal. Is there any real-world outcome, not necessarily claim, because they are all I can pretend to be, you know, the best PPC guy in the world. But that just me saying. So when all of that, we combine all of that, it’s giving the quality satisfaction.

David Bain  

Tiago, you’re last up on this particular question. So what are your thoughts on the way that AI is impacting the way that paid search and SEO can work effectively together?

Tiago Goncalves  

I think it’s impacting in several fields that need to work simultaneously and synchronized. To be honest, I have some practical use cases where things that used to work really well in the past no longer do because of AI and just I was thinking of a particular case that was really outstanding, it’s a tactic that used to work really well for a former company of mine, in which I would pay for a specific consideration keywords in paid search when users are not yet sure which brand they could opt for. 

And it turns out, like back in the day before AI was rolled out, we were able to have ads as being the number one choice for those consideration keywords. And that was working like a charm. And to be honest, as of November 2022 or around that time, ChatGPT, or a little bit obviously afterwards, we got now more social proof-related content being exposed in the AI overview. 

So I was just double-checking what’s going on at the moment, and the number one favourite result is actually Reddit, which is surprisingly taking the spotlight in place of what used to be the Google Ads landscape.

My point is it just goes to show how things are constantly evolving, and we cannot sit still and take effect for granted, and because it could be running a campaign, expecting it to work, but it doesn’t because, not necessarily because the campaign is bad. It’s because the landscape is moving and Google, as a search engine, prefers to opt for a different answer for different queries, which goes to show in this field, but also in other things, like Google Shopping. 

As I said before, back in the day, it was as simple as bidding on a specific keyword that triggers a visual shopping listing. But now you need good reviews. You need a well-established feed, complete with all attributes. You need structured data in place, schema markup, because all of those factors actually add up both to the paid shopping listings as well as organic shopping listings. 

That’s another thing I’ve noticed recently in my current company, implementing simple product schema markup actually drove organic shopping traffic by a substantial margin year on year. So yeah, it’s one of those things that keeps on evolving, and it’s good to keep an eye on the changes.

David Bain  

Okay, and talking about the changes, I’d like to change the format slightly by just doing a very quick-fire round, one particular question, and that is, if an organic search result is number one or a target keyword term, should you also be trying to bid for that term on paid search?

Serge Nguele  

What are we trying to do? If it’s because strategically, as a brand, decided we want to win real estate, that means they would like to be number one on organic and also dominate, you know, the SERP. If we are having a budget consideration, then that means they wouldn’t necessarily be finding us on top position, so we want to serve and not bid on it. There are different outcomes and different strategies, and not a one-size-fits-all approach on that one.

David Bain  

Barbara, what are your thoughts on this?

Barbara Pezzi  

My view on this is you gotta test it, not just test it on and off, but really think about it granularly. So for example, previously I worked in-house and we had really good brand recognition in a couple of countries and we decided to test switching off the brand bidding on one or two countries or different time of the day of the week. 

We found that, for example, in one specific instance, for one brand, we were okay switching off the brand bidding for that specific country, because everyone knew it. We were very strong in it. We didn’t have a lot of competitors bidding on it, so we were good. When we tried to do the same thing in a different country, in a different market, we weren’t successful, so we reinstated it.

With regards to testing and because of the state of attribution as it is right now, what I wouldn’t recommend is to see if your organic bookings, or your organic conversion goes up or down, or your PPC, one goes up or down. But just look at your overall results. Pick a week or couple of weeks, depending on the volume, when you have enormous business time, it’s not a holiday, it’s not high season. And then create a hypothesis, thinking, maybe, what if I just switch it off on weekends? If your weekends are quiet times? What if I switch it off in this geo only, for example, or in this campaign only, and then see what happens? So that’s what I would recommend.

David Bain  

Ryan, should you turn off a paid search campaign if it’s performing well organically as well?

Ryan Glass  

I think if you’re performing well organically, you’re in position one. None of us has ever been in a world where we were gathering 100% of the possible clicks. So I think if you’ve done the things that we talked about earlier in terms of quality, score and aligning what you’re doing, you’re not losing as much by continuing to run your paid search ad in that place, because you should have already optimized for your bid to be as low as it can be. And if there’s anything driving up your bid, that means there’s competitors, and so you need to be running the ad anyways, right? 

I do think that your organic can be capturing the lion’s share of the clicks if you’re very successful, but the only time I would consider turning it off is if it’s not strategically aligned with the business goals, or I can reallocate that budget into a place to do new expansion and demonstrate that I need to then create restart the entire process of optimizing both paid and organic in a new territory, but in your tried and true areas, I think you’re not losing a lot by, as Serge said, really trying to capture as much real estate as you can when you’ve proven that it’s ROI positive.

David Bain  

Georgia, if you don’t mind, I’ll try and ask the question in a slightly different way, and that is, if someone has searched for a brand term, and it’s highly, highly likely that they’re after that particular brand, and you turn off the paid search ad for that particular brand term, and you’re relying on the individual to navigate down to the organic listing for the brand, but a competitor has bidded on your brand. That is obviously not the brand in question, but a result that appears above the organic search result. How likely is it that the user clicks on the competitor as opposed to the organic search result?

Georgia Bloomberg  

I think it’s quite it’s hard to say, because obviously I’m not in that user’s mindset, but I think it would be quite likely, because I think with the way everything has kind of evolved, with how we consume media, we have all gotten so lazy. 

If you think about how TikTok has suddenly emerged as one of the number one social platforms, because people are able to consume content so quickly. So I think when it comes to the mind of the user, yes, we might be okay if I want to buy from this brand. But also this one’s just appeared, and they’re closer to where that will take me less time to do it. So I’m going to click on this so, and maybe that’s just me generalizing, because you can never, you can never truly say whether someone is going to outwardly go out of the way to scroll to way to scroll to the bottom of the page. 

But what I would say is, I think when it comes to the the whole rule around brand bidding, it is definitely in what was being said earlier, regarding how what the competitors are doing the auction, versus how your what your what your organic ranking is, I think, in a world in which you have no competition, and you’re organically ranking number one, absolutely, you switch off that brand term, and then you actually go out, go outwards, and say, Okay, well, we know that we rank really well organically here, and we know that the competition for this term is really low. 

But what terms do we have where we have really high competition and organically, we don’t rank well? Can paid search then go and go after those keywords, and in the background, because SEO is a longer term goal, we’re going to work on building up to, you know, improve ranking for that keyword. Then we can now look to, okay, we rank well here, now we’ll go after this keyword where we don’t rank well. So I think it’s a very slick, cyclical thing. 

Also, the auction changes all the time. One day, a competitor could be bidding, one day they might not be bidding. So yeah, it really does kind of boil down to us actually being able to measure what those competitors are doing, and then being reactive with our strategy. And yeah, just just actually making sure you’re communicating with the SEO team and paid search team vice versa, to make sure you can continue to do it, it’s almost like an engine, like you’re continuing to move with that kind of cyclical strategy.

Serge Nguele 

Just quickly, on Barbara’s point, I agree with everything, and then I would have a user angle, and that’s where I’m not on in the it depends. So I would always, whenever possible, I recommend to always bid on your brand for that particular reason. 

I’ve had some people, believe it or not, they will come having a brand in mind, and they will click on the first link, go with whatever they were to do. And I’m taking this on the charity sector, which is one I work quite a lot. And I would have the client coming to say we are having complaint that someone has made a donation for a certain charity, but because they just blindly clicked and followed the process and to refund and why this is happening, because he just went on with the first, you know, brand coming on top.

David Bain  

What are your thoughts, Thiago?

Tiago Goncalves  

My thoughts align with what everyone else said here. I think what’s key it’s also like to not forget about competition. So when we’re trying to understand whether, if it’s beneficial to stop branded bidding, we need to pay attention to auction insights in Google Ads. 

I also find myself in an industry, at the moment, the flower business, that actually is very prone to last-minute buying decision switches. So like Georgia has said, I see it in real practical cases that people do search for our competitors, but if I bid on their terms, they opt for us instead. It’s literally cause and effect for us. So if one of our competitors is not sharp enough to keep up their their exposure, we “eat their lunch” in the end. 

But it also depends, like I’ve had clients in the past when I was working for agencies that, because the buying cycle and the buying decision was longer, and the pricing of the product obviously was more expensive, like we’re logging cars or vacations. Obviously, in that case, it’s not that people search for a brand and then last minute, switch to another one easily and buy from someone else instead. 

So I’ve been noticing the more quicker the product is, in terms of whether it’s a disposable product, or, like, cheaper or affordable, people might move their opinions and swap decisions for whoever has the best offer. 

So something interesting for the ones listening to this podcast, you can find out in my community, somebody shared the script that pays attention to Google Search Console queries and also whether they are already being bid on on Google Ads, but also takes into account auction insights data and without three metrics connected, we can actually know whether, if it’s beneficial to pause a keyword that is number one already be ranked well organically and not bid in by any other competitor. That script actually pauses or re-enables the keyword depending on those factors. So good to take into account, in case you want to save budget. 

Lastly, just one last thing that crossed my mind when we talk about this topic, is attribution. So right now, there’s multiple tools out there that do blended attribution, like not being like other players like triple boil, and these tools basically understand the whole omni-channel marketing efforts, and it’s possible to understand the contribution of branded campaigns in the overall bigger picture. And most likely, the branded campaigns don’t contribute to as much as prospecting as any other campaign, so which is obvious, because whoever searches for that already was probably about to buy anyway. So good to not forget. In case you’re working with big clients with big budgets, I would definitely invest time and energy to understand attribution and across multiple channels as well.

David Bain  

Thanks so much everyone for joining today. Let’s just zoom around them to remind the listener where you can find out more about them. Barbara, where can people find out more about you?

Barbara Pezzi  

Thank you David for having me here, it’s been a great discussion. You can find me on LinkedIn or on my website, which is BarbaraPezzi.com.

David Bain  

Superb and Ryan, where can people find out more about you?

Ryan Glass  

Thank you David for having me. Thank you to my fellow panelists. I learned a lot today. The best place to find me is on LinkedIn at RyanGlassNYC, although I promise I’m in London, I just haven’t updated the URL.

David Bain  

Superb. Thanks Ryan, and Serge, where can people find you?

Serge Nguele  

Thanks for having us. It was a really great, intellectual collaboration. Some food for thought. Yeah, I can be found online on LinkedIn, Serge Nguele or on YourPPCDoctor.com.

David Bain  

Thank you Serge. Georgia, where can people find you?

Georgia Bloomberg  

Yeah, I can be found on LinkedIn, Georgia Bloomberg, and then as a reminder, I’m from Found, the Everysearch™ agency.

David Bain  

Lovely. Thanks so much. And Tiago?

Tiago Goncalves  

You can find me on LinkedIn, my name is Tiago Goncalves, and I’m currently working for a company called Euroflorist, but also managing a community, so feel free to join.

David Bain  

I’ve been your host, David Bain, and you’ve been listening to the Majestic SEO panel. If you want to join us live next time, sign up at majestic.com/webinars and of course, check out SEOin2026.com too.

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