Case Study: MSP Organic Traffic Spurred By PPC

One historically contentious topic in the online marketing space is whether or not advertising is required for success in SEO. Does buying traffic from Google Advertising efforts directly influence whether or not your website ranks organically? That question has historically been tough to answer because the influence is rarely measurable directly and conclusively. Often time website updates preclude an advertising effort, so it’s hard to say, was it the website updates or was it the advertising? Running PPC campaigns and sending traffic to a mature business in a competitive market hasn’t resulted in any noticeable boost in traffic that I’ve seen, but would it? I’ve never seen firsthand a valid experiment that would allow me to say “yes, PPC definitely influences organic search results”. At least not until now. In this case study we’ll talk about how a small northwest-based MSP in a low-competition market started dominating the search results in both paid and organic after launching a PPC campaign.

PPC Influence On Organic Search

There are hundreds of ranking factors that Google considers when ranking a website and a chunk of them are sourced from real-world engagement statistics from the Google Chrome browser. Google doesn’t have to guess how well your website is performing because they can camp your statistics via their Chrome browser. They can get an understanding of how long people are staying on your site, scroll depth, link clicks, form submissions, and other engagement metrics they are collecting.

Google can use this data to pit your website against competitors across town and see who should be ranked higher. But what if your website traffic is so low that Google doesn’t have enough data to accurately rank your website? How will you ever even be considered for rankings if you’ve never generated traffic to a page in the first place? It’s tough, I can tell you that.

Many MSPs fit this bill, their website traffic is just so low that they can’t even get the ball rolling in Google’s eyes to be considered a website to be ranked. They don’t have any backlinks pointing their way and they don’t have any traffic. This is especially true for MSPs who don’t blog and only build commercial-oriented landing pages. Commerical-oriented landing pages tend to rank for highly competitive terms like “it support city name”, but if they don’t rank high enough they will never generate any clicks and therefore will never get enough data in the eyes of search engines to climb the ranks. Eventually their site will be ignored.

Their are a few ways to circumvent this problem.

• Send traffic to your website without relying on organic search
• Build backlinks to your website so that search engines discover your site via higher-trust domains
• Create content on your website in less competitive areas via blogging so that your site can source organic traffic and build trust that way

MSP Realizes Immediate Boost In Organic Visibility After Launching PPC Campaign

In the case of this northwest MSP, they began to send traffic to their website via pay-per-click advertising on Google, which was enough for their website to see a dramatic increase in organic search traffic. This is all in addition to the advertising traffic they were now buying. They reached out to Tortoise and Hare in May of 2024, and after a brief sales process decided to move forward with a PPC advertising effort. We launched their MSP PPC campaigns in June, which is typically a period of declining search traffic during the summer months.

Even I was surprised how quick the boost was. This northwestern based MSP experienced:

• Doubled organic search clicks
• Tripled organic search impressions
• Increased search engine visibility in the market from 10% to 30% for tracked high-competition keywords
• Increased lead volume from 0-2 to averaging 5-7 leads per month between PPC and SEO

The crazy part about all of this is, they weren’t even spending a ton on advertising. In fact they are our lowest spending client right now, and have probably become our best-performing client in terms of efficiency dollar for dollar. If only it was this easy all the time.

Why This MSP Experienced Such Great Results

This sort of immediate boost is rare, and the main reason this client was able to generate such positive results is that their MSP PPC advertising efforts led to substantial increases in organic traffic, brought on by their newly launched advertising campaign. This case study was interesting and allowed us to see conclusively that yes, PPC absolutely influences organic search traffic. Not every MSP should expect these results though. The main characteristics that created the conditions for this type of success were:

• Low competition market.
• The company had low organic traffic and low visibility.
• Despite their low traffic and low visibility, they were still among the top competitors so they were already on the bubble of better rankings and visibility.
• Despite a small website their website was high quality and converted very well and therefore sent positive signals to search engines about their website.

The main factor here was a low-competition market, the client was in a T3 city with less than a million in population in the broader metro. But hey, who cares right? Lead flow is lead flow and revenue is revenue and sometimes just doing something that your competitors aren’t doing is all it takes to gain a significant edge.

Final Thoughts

This was an interesting case study, it was interesting because we rarely meet and MSP that is perfectly fine and ready to go with their website as is for their advertising effort, but in this MSPs case they had a pretty high quality website out the gate and we were able to just add on advertising with no additional changes. This created the conditions needed for a valid experiment that allowed us to conclusively say that yes advertising can influence SEO and drive additional organic traffic. We’ve seen this effect before but rarely in isolation and its effects are typically more muted for larger more established businesses in higher competition markets.

Want to get an understanding of how launching a pay-per-click advertising effort might influence your organic search traffic? Reach out to Tortoise and Hare today and learn more about our search engine marketing services.