Mega Study: How We Reliably Drive 6x More Traffic than Google Ads
Companies need to constantly increase the amount of relevant, high-value traffic coming to their websites. Many digital channels have become uncertain, or their costs continue to increase.
For example, the average cost per click that B2B companies pay to Google Ads is $3.33 per click – and for some companies, $18.00 per click is considered normal.
Meanwhile, Profound Strategy’s modern approach to SEO and SEO Certified Content drives valuable, non-branded organic traffic to client websites for only $0.57 per session—a huge savings of 83%, or more.
As many B2B marketers struggle to keep up with the changes in search algorithms and SEO in general, Profound Strategy continues to deliver organic search strategies that outperform other digital marketing channels.
Important Context
The SEO programs described here were researched and developed in Syllabus, a new kind of SEO software that the Profound Strategy team has been quietly building for years.
LIMITED OPPORTUNITY: Learn how to create SEO programs like this in an upcoming private Syllabus live stream.
Introduction: ROI of SEO vs. Google Ads
Are Profound Strategy’s SEO programs an efficient and effective use of marketing spend?
Digital marketing leaders face increasing pressure to optimize ROI and “do more with less.” With multiple channels to choose from, marketers must constantly weigh the return on an investment to determine which strategies are the most efficient, as well as effective.
Most marketing leaders know that a successful SEO strategy is the surest path to long-term growth and increasing returns. But even within organic search there are multiple strategies, tactics, and experts all offering the “best” SEO.
The team at Profound Strategy has designed and executed a uniquely modern and high-impact approach to SEO for the past decade—specifically aimed at creating efficient, revenue-focused results for clients.
Is it working? Is Profound Strategy’s distinct approach to SEO the ideal choice for a digital marketing investment? We turned to the data to find out.
Methodology: The Components of “6x More Traffic”
Companies need to increase the amount of valuable, high-value organic traffic that lands on their website each month, but most digital marketers can’t measure the impact of their SEO efforts. Profound Strategy built the Cost Per Added Session metric to solve this problem.
What is Cost Per Added Session?
The Cost per Added Session (CPAS) is a PPC comparison that measures how much each organic session from SEO Certified Content “cost.” It is the amount a client spends on SEO Certified Content, divided by the new organic traffic added to the domain by that content.
Total Cost of Producing/Updating Content / Total SEO Traffic Increase Directly from Content = Cost per Added Session (CPAS)
What is SEO Certified Content?
SEO Certified Content is content produced to a rigorous process and set of standards to be not just good or optimized SEO content—which most SEO programs pursue—but, instead, to be the very best content in the world.
Most content programs publish hundreds of pieces of content, but only 1% produces meaningful SEO results. With SEO Certified Content 60 to 70% of content delivers meaningful SEO results.
SEO Certified Content:
– Targets ICPs throughout the buying journey. The process determines—through dedicated marketing research—the needs driving users to search, so it can meet those needs.
– Audits competitors. Next, we find the best pieces of content meeting those needs and performing well in organic search.
– Focuses on the ranking signals that matter. We identify the novel rank signals in the winning pages that appear to be causing them to out-perform so many competitors.
SEO Certified Content is then crafted to leverage all those insights and to be even better than the current winning content. It’s made better by:
– Looking at novel rank signals and qualities of the best content to date asking why it seems to be doing well and then improving on those insights.
– Leveraging all of the team’s creativity to ask how we take a large leap forward, beyond what the current content is doing, to make it even better.
– Taking the unique value propositions, opinions, and perspectives of our clients, and integrate that into the piece. The content is not only informative, helpful, and engaging, but opinionated, unique, and distinct.
By pulling all this together, and with a streamlined operation enabled by Syllabus, we are able to produce exceptional content that is steps above the current winners.
For this study, we looked at all of our SEO projects which deployed Profound Strategy’s SEO Certified Content from the past five years, and averaged the Cost Per Added Session after various intervals of engagement: 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, 36 months, and 48 months.
We focused on the 24-month mark as a reasonable timeframe, however, growth continues for 36 to 48 months and beyond.
Quantity vs. Quality?
SEO Certified Content has been found to consistently generate quality traffic and valuable leads and revenue for businesses.
Some marketers have heard of SEO campaigns that drive irrelevant or low-quality traffic. That is not the case for SEO Certified Content.
Profound Strategy’s SEO Certified Content consistently directs quality organic traffic that is relevant and of value to businesses. In general, traffic driven by SEO Certified Content meets or exceeds marketers’ expectations in that it:
– Is relevant to the company–the target audience, in-market buyers, etc.
– Converts at acceptable or above-average rates.
– Results in quality leads that turn into long-term customers.
This study does not include an in-depth analysis of lead gen from SEO Certified Content programs, but the scope of this study only included campaigns where the quality of SEO traffic met or exceeded the standards of the in-house marketing leadership.
Results: SEO that Delivers More Value than Google Ads
Profound Strategy’s modern approach to organic search and SEO Certified Content drives new, non-branded organic traffic to client websites for an average of $0.57 per session.
Compared to the average B2B Google Ads campaign cost of $3.33 per click1, SEO Certified Contents represents an 83% reduction of marketing spend for traffic to B2B company websites.
Although $3.33 is the average B2B cost-per-click, many companies we work with spend as much as $18 per click with Google Ads.
Fig 1: A comparison of the amount digital marketers spend on organic traffic from Profound Strategy’s growth campaigns, the average Google Ads spend for B2B companies, and the Google Ads spend from many B2B SaaS brands.
When we aggregate data from all Profound Strategy clients over the past five years, the SEO spend divided by the number of new, non-branded organic sessions that our work added to their domains, nets an average “cost” of $0.57 per visit.
For example, a few individual client Cost Per Added Session calculations look like this:
Fig 2: Sample Cost Per Added Session (CPAS) data from a sampling of Profound Strategy clients, brand names redacted.
What does that mean for marketing budgets?
Based on this data, a spend of $10,000 with Google Ads will deliver, on average, 3,003 clicks to a website. In comparison, that same spend on Profound Strategy’s SEO programs resulted in an overage of 17,544 SEO visitors to the marketer’s website.
Fig 3: The average traffic generated by the same investment in Google Ads vs. SEO Certified Content
Profound Strategy’s uniquely competitive approach to SEO produces content that consistently wins in organic search. Those reliable results drive efficient rates of return.
Discussion: Additional Insights on the Value of SEO Certified Content
SEO Certified Content—designed for AI-driven algorithms, with a focus on revenue impact—can turn organic search into a digital marketer’s most cost-effective channel.
Three additional implications stand out.
1. The ROI on Profound Strategy’s SEO improves over time.
SEO Certified Content continues to build momentum in organic search, earning more and more traffic to each URL over time. This consistent growth continues to drive improvement in the Cost Per Added Session—from $0.57 per session all the way down to $0.20 per session as content reaches absolute maturity.
Fig 4: The longer Profound Strategy’s modern SEO work continues, the more momentum and traffic it earns. As spend remains consistent and traffic increases, the Cost Per Added Session continues to improve YoY for up to five years.
Compared to paid search channels, like Google Ads, SEO Certified Content delivers exponentially more value.
2. The value of SEO Certified Content lasts longer than other channels.
SEO is the only digital marketing channel that continues to deliver substantial value after work is paused.
Stop investing in PPC and paid traffic stops. Stop sending emails, and leads from emails stop.
By contrast, Profound Strategy’s SEO Certified Content can continue to build momentum and drive increasing rates of organic traffic for months or years, even if the SEO investment gets paused2. In fact, we’re still seeing Cost Per Added Session improve with unsupported content published as far back as 2019.
For example, in the anonymized client forecast below, the blue line, tracking actual organic traffic to SEO Certified Content continues to climb exactly as forecast, even after the investment stopped. Cost Per Added Session continued to improve in parallel.
Fig 5: Forecast graph from a client dashboard showing the range of added traffic expected and the actual traffic to SEO Certified Content well after budget cuts ended Profound Strategy’s work with this client.
3. The value of SEO hits sooner than we thought.
SEO is often characterized as a long-term investment and marketing strategy, and it is. The very best that organic growth strategies have to offer comes after dedicated investment.
But that doesn’t mean that SEO can only deliver in the long-term. Cost Per Added Session data shows the cost of organic traffic from SEO Certified Content beating Google Ads just nine months after the start of a Profound Strategy program.
Fig 6: Organic traffic to SEO Certified Content costs less than paid traffic from PPC campaigns after only 9 months of modern SEO investment.
Where most SEO programs have undefined expectations, Profound Strategy’s SEO Certified Content has been found to consistently outperform Google Ads’ ROI—in a reasonable and measurable time frame. This makes SEO Certified Content programs a highly valuable growth channel for marketers.
Important Context
The SEO programs described here were researched and developed in Syllabus, a new kind of SEO software that the Profound Strategy team has been quietly building for years.
LIMITED OPPORTUNITY: Learn how to create SEO programs like this in an upcoming private Syllabus live stream.
Conclusion & Next Steps
Investment in SEO growth with Profound Strategy creates a better ROI for site traffic than an investment in Google Ads by delivering relevant, high-value traffic at a substantially lower cost.
SEO Certified Content drives traffic at $0.57 per session, while Google Ads ranges from $3.33 to $18.00 CPC.
In a season when digital marketers are increasingly being asked to improve efficiencies and defend their ROIs, SEO Certified Content provides the solution. No other channel offers revenue-focused growth at such a competitive rate—especially not with the kind of quick results and long-term impact.
Next Steps
Are you struggling to deliver the SEO growth you need?
Request a call now to speak with an SEO professional at Profound Strategy and see exactly how much growth an SEO Certified Content program can deliver for you.
You can also learn more about the software behind this study, Syllabus.
Footnotes:
1 “Google Ads Benchmarks for YOUR Industry [Updated!]” WordStream. 2024.
2 Not recommended