PPC vs Content Marketing for SaaS Web Traffic

To look at buying traffic Pay Per Click (PPC) versus organically attracting it with content marketing, I want to share an from a recent client engagement.

Our client, a privacy SAAS solution who is going to remain anonymous here, spent 12k on SEO driven content marketing with us to achieve visitor traffic with a PPC value of 36k - a neat 3X cost saving.

Here’s how:

Going Beyond Branded Search

Our client had a fantastic product. They sold a next-generation privacy and security solution that protects accounts, payments, and personal data across every online transaction. 

But they were facing challenges like:

• An extremely competitive marketplace. They were competing with established free and paid alternatives to their product, many of which have large SEO and PPC budgets. 

• Dozens of reviews and articles that still referred to our client’s product by the name of the company they acquired and linked back to pages that no longer exist.

Before we started work, almost all of their web traffic came from branded keywords, i.e., their name.

Beating PPC with Content Marketing

Working with their CMO, we developed two actions that turned the needle (skip to the end to see what happened). 

1. Hyper-Targeted Outreach

Under the CMO’s direction, we audited how the solution purchased by the client appeared on third-party sites, including in reviews on well-established online magazines and affiliate websites.

Then, we filtered out sites that didn't make sense to update. For example, low domain authority sites that didn’t hold much value.

The links that would give the most value were contextual links and reviews from high-domain authority websites.

To convince these sites to change their article/review to refer to our client's product, we wrote each publication a personalized email and suggested some text they could use instead. 

Critically, we explained why doing this would help their readers by giving them the correct information. 

The result was:

• Several new backlinks on high DA sites.

• Interest from journalists/editors in writing reviews on our client’s product in sites including PCMagazine.

• Interest in our client’s new affiliate program.

2. Bottom of the funnel content

Our client wanted organic traffic, who doesn't?

But with so many competitors, we knew that publishing top-of-the-funnel awareness content (a typical traffic magnet) would never deliver on that goal. 

We wanted to deliver bottom-of-the-funnel content that would convert users and show business results. However, this typically does not generate a lot of traffic.

To get traffic and conversions, we came up with an idea. “What about high-traffic middle-of-the-funnel (MOF) and bottom-of-the-funnel (BOF) review content?”

We knew (through our keyword and market research) that although some people were searching for our client, more people were looking for their competitors. Many of these people were interested in comparing our client’s competitors before they purchased one or the other.

We spotted an opportunity to put our client’s name into this conversation. 

To do this, we developed a series of competitor articles with concepts like: 

• X (major industry player) versus Y (other major industry player) versus (our client).

• X (major industry player) alternatives

• This technology (used by major industry places) is not safe. What to use instead.

But, there was an obvious content development challenge: You cannot just disparage your competitors. 

If you start putting out content that attacks your competition, what will happen is that a) no one will trust you, b) your competitors will attack you back, and c) you could potentially be sued if you say something they think is false.

Attacking your competition creates negative value.

But fairly reviewing them adds value.

To get this balance right, you need to actually review your competitors. 

You need to compare the experience of using their products to the experience of using your own product.

Go really in-depth, act as a magazine review team would, and most importantly, be (mostly) impartial.

That’s what we did. 

We reviewed our client’s competitors, took screenshots of our experience, and compared them to what our client did. We also developed content assets around these reviews that are personalized, i.e., “when I tried x product, I found this.”  

It helps that our client’s product was actually very good, but we stand by these reviews as fair and honest, pointing out the flaws in everyone's product.

These assets were then published as blog posts in the name of the client's technical team. 

We knew this would help our client in three ways:

• Tie in what Google wants in terms of EEAT.

• Answer real searcher queries and provide value.

• Put our client’s name into search queries for bigger brands.

The Outcome

Note: To quantify results, we are using some technical terms like SERP (search engine results page), KD (keyword difficulty - how hard it is to rank for a term), and search volume (how many people are searching for a term each month).

Taking data from Semrush and our client’s internal analytics over a four-month period, we saw the following:

• ~ 2,500 new keywords acquired.

• A >2X jump in organic traffic to the site.

• A dwell time average of over 4 minutes on high-quality content assets.

• Multiple featured snippets and no.1 and top 3 rankings for high-volume keywords, including competitor product names.

• Over 100 SERP features, including featured snippets for the search term “should I use (competitors product)” and a search term with a KD of 100 and search volume of >4k.

• Over 60 top 3 results and 100+ top 10 results.

The total cost to our client for the content marketing strategy and development was $12000

If they have achieved the same traffic with PPC, the total cost would be $3000 per month or $36000 per year. 

PPC would have been three times more expensive than SEO focused content marketing for the same traffic.  Plus PPC is a continuous cost, while our organic efforts should continue to pay for themselves for a long time to come.

🔥 Key Learnings:

🔥PPC and SEO should be used in conjunction but, in certain circumstances, SEO driven content can be several times more cost effective than PPC.

🔥Use your competitors' brands against them by creating user-focused content.

🔥To get high-quality backlinks, reach out but be hyper-targeted and prepare to invest time. 

🔥You can double your organic inbound traffic in a competitive space.

🔥A small number of quality content assets will win against quantity.