Paid Search (PPC)
Auction-based placements bought by advertisers, normally labelled "Sponsored" or "Ad".
Analogy Mental model
The shelf next to the supermarket till. Whoever pays the listing fee gets their gum at eye level. The product did not win on merit, it rented the position.
In practice What you actually do
SEO and paid search should share data instead of competing for credit. Mine the ad account for query-level conversion data to pick content topics, and when competitors bid on your brand terms, fund a defensive campaign rather than complaining about it.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Treating the two channels as a zero-sum budget fight is the mistake. On a high-intent term such as "enterprise software pricing", owning both the top ad and the top organic result tends to lift total conversion rate well beyond what either channel delivers alone. The 25% figure repeated at conferences is a rule of thumb, not a controlled result: treat it as direction, not a forecast.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →