Paid vs Organic Search – How to Find the Right Balance

September 6, 2025

Often, when you read articles comparing organic search and paid search, they are pitched as two opposing areas of digital marketing, where a choice needs to be made as to which of the two channels to focus your budget and resources on. However, they aren’t rivals – they’re teammates.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What is the difference between paid and organic search?
• Compare paid and organic search
• Achieve better organic traffic
• Optimize your paid search efforts
• How to combine paid and organic search
• Conclusion – Maximize your presence on the SERP

For a start, it’s time to stop thinking about paid vs. organic search as a battle when a far more productive view is to see the two channels as complementary and work towards maximizing your brand’s presence through both.

What is the difference between organic and paid search?

Before going into some strategies through which you can manage both tactics to complement each other, it is worth understanding both concepts, and outlining the key differences between them.

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Organic search results

Organic search is when a user finds your website by typing a question or phrase into a search engine, and then clicks on a non-paid result. Organic results appear on a SERP based on their relevancy to the question or phrase the user initially searched.

The traffic that a website earns through an organic click is not bought, like with paid search – it is organically earned. The main expense is the time and resources to rank high.

The organic search results (blue links) are the core list of results that show underneath the paid, or sponsored results.

In addition to the traditional organic blue links on a SERP, there are over 40 SERP features, and now, generated AI (genAI) results, e.g. AI Overviews.

In the following example, the keyword ‘when is the best time to book flights’ shows an AI Overview, which summarises information from multiple sources into one, cohesive overview – providing a ‘zero-click’ answer. Below this, there is a ‘people also ask’ SERP feature, detailing other related questions users have asked associated with the initial key phrase searched.

Organic results for the keyword: When is the best time to book flights, Google

Paid search results

Paid searches are advertisements, which are displayed at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), typically from position 1 to 4. 

Paid search results usually appear above organic listings, in various formats, and are marked with a ‘Sponsored’ label:

Sponsored results for the keyword: Best holiday destinations, Google

Sponsored results for the keyword: Best moisturizer with SPF, Google

These advertisements are the primary way in which search engines make profit. Paid search works on a pay-per-click model (PPC), where site owners pay a charge to have their site shown in the top results of the SERP, based on the cost of a keyword, through keyword bidding. When a user searches and clicks on your ad, you’re then charged for that click.

These ads provide a paid alternative to help users find what they are looking for through keyword targeting and are managed through the Google Ads platform.

Although sometimes costly, paid search is a great way to boost your visibility and click-through-rate, with Google PPC ads having an average return on investment of 200%. Google holds over 80% of the global search engine market, making it the go-to for most advertisers.

Compare paid and organic search

Paid vs Organic Search Comparison Table

Though many marketers use an organic-only or PPC-only approach to promote their content, most end up realizing that they will only achieve the results they want through a combination of both tactics.

To ensure your organic and paid efforts complement each other effectively, each must first be strategically sound and independently optimized.

Achieve better organic traffic

Ultimately, when it comes to effective organic search engine optimization (SEO), there are three key pillars you should be aware of:

• On-page SEO – The process of optimizing content on your site to ensure it is relevant to the user, and provides a great user experience.
  • By doing keyword research, looking at ranking SERP features, and performing competitive analyses, you can optimize your site’s content
     
• Off-page SEO – The process of enhancing your site’s search engine ranking through activities outside of the site itself.
  • This is largely done through link building, in which you’ll want to prioritize building high-quality backlinks, helping to build your website’s reputation.
     
• Technical SEO – The process of performing an audit on your website to identify technical issues, such as broken pages, and fixing them to improve your website’s performance, readability to search crawlers, and user experience.

To increase your potential to appear in SERP features, follow best practices. Some tips include- structuring your content and having a clear site architecture, using lists, embedding information in tables, targeting question-based and intent-rich keywords, answering questions, formatting content with headings and body text, and more.

To appear in gen-AI results, is a different case entirely, and best practices are still being researched. Some tips include- building your brand authority, through mentions on other authoritative websites, and forums like Reddit, creating query-intent based content, prioritizing structured data, and more.

This may sound like a lot – so if you’re in the position to hire an SEO expert, you should. However, keeping on top of your organic traffic is achievable, as long as you have the resources to continually evaluate and optimize your website.

To achieve better organic traffic, marketers should follow SEO best practices, review the various ranking factors which Google takes into account (there are over 200), and stay up to date on search engine algorithm updates.

Optimize your paid search efforts

In addition to your organic search strategy, you should put effort in to maximize your paid search strategy.

Paid search campaigns require thoughtful optimization, through targeting the right keywords, focusing on how competitive that keyword is, its relevance to your business, and its semantic architecture. You should also consider segmenting your audience to target them with different kinds of ads.

Once you have decided on your target keywords, you then need to create your ad and think about which ad formats to use. Explore placing display and video ads on other types of channels, too, like YouTube. Look at what ad extensions would be useful to provide more information, such as site links and your phone number. Learn more on how to set up Google Ads.

Retargeting, also called remarketing, is key to your content’s success. Retargeting is the more commonly used term, however, Google Ads uses remarketing for its retargeting feature. Retargeting ads are served based on a user’s activity on your website. Once the user visits the site, a cookie is set, and you can now target them on other sites they visit with relevant advertisements.

Google assesses the quality of your ads, and assigns them a Quality Score, to assess how useful they are. Use this as a benchmark, and work on improving your quality score through A/B testing, streamlined keyword research, and optimizing your landing pages. By measuring your ad performance, you’ll be able to pivot when your ad campaign is no longer working.

It’s imperative you also keep on top of PPC trends, such as AI search.

How to combine paid and organic search

As mentioned earlier, marketing teams can’t thrive on paid or organic promotion alone. Your campaigns will do better with a combination of these two tactics.

1. Use paid search to inform organic keyword research

One key benefit of running PPC and SEO in tandem is the ability to use the rich keyword data within Ads to inform your SEO efforts.

Unfortunately, for anyone working solely in SEO, it can be difficult to get access to organic keyword information as the vast majority of organic keywords will be bundled into Google Analytics.

A good way to overcome this issue is to use your paid search data to inform your SEO strategy. 

When running a paid search campaign, you will be able to report on a keyword level performance to a very granular level. Using the two columns ‘impressions’ and ‘impression share’ in particular can help you calculate the total monthly search volume for a given term. 

This information can arm your SEO strategy with the knowledge of which keywords are the most important when optimizing your site and content.

2. Rely on organic for brand traffic and paid for generic

Typically, consumers use generic terms during the research phase and brand terms when they are more likely to make a purchase.

A practical example of this would be someone looking to buy soccer boots. They may initially search ‘best soccer boots for soft ground’. This user is looking to research several different brands, read reviews, and then finally decide on the brand of boots they would like. They may also discover new brands via the sponsored carousel or AI Overviews.

Upon making their decision, they may click on an ad or they may also do further research by doing a brand-related search.

The generic term yields sponsored ads from several brands, Google

In the above example, Adidas will naturally rank very strongly (almost always top of page) organically because it is their own brand term. As they are at the top of the page already, they may decide not to engage in paid search activity for this term.

However, when the user searches for ‘best football boots for soft ground’ there will be a myriad of brands and websites to consider, and it will be a lot more difficult for Adidas to rank in position one for this term. As a result, Adidas may want to run paid ads for this more generic term.

So, a rule of thumb that an advertiser may follow is to push more budget to generic paid search to capture consumers in the research phase and to rely on their organic brand listing to capture the sale.

3. Ramp up paid search where organic presence may be poor

Every brand will want to rank in position one organically for every keyword that is relevant to their business. This, however, is simply not possible. Similarly, every brand would love to own position one for every keyword they bid on in the paid listings, but to do this would prove incredibly expensive.

So, a smart and collaborative search strategy is to try to dovetail paid and organic listings. This can be achieved by benchmarking organic rankings across a wide number of keywords relevant to the business.

For terms (such as brand terms) where the site has a strong organic ranking, they could potentially pull back on paid and allow their organic listing to capture as much of the traffic from that keyword as possible.

Conversely, if the brand’s rankings for certain, long-tail keywords were poor or not even on page one of Google, then they can make sure they have some visibility at the top of the search results page by engaging in paid ads.

This is a clear example of where a strategy combining the two search channels can result in delivering overall budgeting efficiencies.

Conclusion – Maximize your presence on the SERP

Most companies spend a lot of time creating and distributing content, thinking that if they build great content, users will find it, engage with it and move down the sales funnel; but this almost never works.

There’s so much noise dictating that your great content will never get the attention it deserves. To achieve content marketing success, build your brand by creating and promoting valuable content organically first, then add paid promotion where it makes sense.

The key to combining both strategies lies in visibility on the SERP – when they are used together, you can maximize your visibility and presence.

Finally, ensure you are tracking the performance of your combined search strategy, to identify opportunities and gaps.