Hey friend,
Marketing is… a little bit nuts right now, isn’t it?
People are testing Clawd Bots, Anthropic is launching Super Bowl attack ads against OpenAI, and if I read one more post about a 567-step n8n workflow that can “replace” an entire marketing team… well 🙃
But, there’s one thing that won’t change anytime soon—me getting asked this question (nearly) every time I audit an account:
“Should I invest in organic content and SEO, or put more budget into paid search?”
My answer is always the same: you must do both.
Picking one or the other will kill pipeline and lead to what I call a Google Doom spiral, which is what happens when marketing teams either:
After auditing hundreds of accounts, I've seen the damage these spirals can do. When marketers treat SEO and paid search as separate acquisition channels, it starves the channels from the data needed to get results.
This is why you need to blend paid search and organic strategy to get decent ROI when playing in Google’s playground. The B2Bs generating the most pipeline for the lowest acquisition costs treat Google as an ecosystem where the channels feed off each other.
So, I wrote today’s newsletter to help you avoid (or escape) Google Doom spirals. Here's my four-step playbook to get your organic and paid channels working together 👇
How To NOT Fall Into A Google Doom Spiral
I want to kick off by saying this system is what we use internally at KlientBoost—and it's how organic search became our highest ROI channel by miles.
Real data from our acquisition dashboard. Our top two channels continue to be organic + paid search… I thought SEO and paid ads were supposed to be dead? 😉 (Image: Dreamdata)
When you use paid search to establish which keywords convert to pipeline and build a Google strategy around those keywords, this method becomes the best way to get real revenue from your organic program as well.
This also crushes the “SEO takes time” argument by putting some quick wins on the board:
Paid accelerates insight collection around what keywords work. You get this data in 30-90 days vs. 6-12 months
Organic reduces paid costs over time as you know where to reallocate budget based on proven keyword success
You build an organic + paid loop. This loop finds new high-intent keywords → validates them → ranks organically → repeat
Here's exactly how to implement it 👇
Step 1: Build Your Paid Search Validation Engine
Start by identifying 10-15 target keyword themes using SEMrush or Ahrefs.
Jump into either platform and use the Keyword Finder tool to filter for transactional and commercial keywords.
What you want are keywords related to your product or service category. For SaaS, it’ll be your core features and anything with modifiers like "software," "solution," "platform," or "tool."
These modifiers indicate buying intent because of the search specificity.
Once you have a pool of keywords, run ads for them. If you don’t have existing campaigns setup, we have a whole library full of guides to get you started.
💡 One thing to be cautious of is to not spread your budget too thin over unproven keywords. If you target more keywords than your budget can handle, it will slow the entire process down and lower your overall pipeline conversion rate.
Step 2: Set Up Offline Conversion Tracking
Next, send CRM lifecycle data (MQLs, SQLs, closed/won deals) back into your Google Ads platform.
80% of prospects I audit still don't have this set up. But, it's honestly one of the easiest ways to generate more pipeline in Google Ads as it feeds the platform keyword data to help it understand what drives revenue.
How to do it:
In your Google Ads account, click the Goals icon
Click the Conversions drop-down in the section menu, then click Summary and the + New conversion action
Click Conversions from an offline source and add data source
Click Connect with a product and Choose the new data source that you want to set up. This will depend on your tooling setup. If you can’t connect directly, you will need to integrate this with Zapier or a custom API
That’s it!
Your Google Ads dashboard will show revenue data against your campaigns once offline conversion tracking is setup
📔 A note on conversion tracking: Setting up offline conversion tracking is non-negotiable to make this playbook work. Without MQLs, SQLs, and closed/won data flowing back into Google Ads and GA4, you won’t get the insights you need to improve channel performance.
This is why KlientBoost strategists obsesses over proper attribution setup. It's literally the difference between guessing and knowing what drives revenue. Reply to this email if you need help to get this up and running in your account—I got you 🤝
Step 3: Analyze Data + Build Your SEO Strategy
After 30-90 days (this will depend on how long your sales cycle is), analyze which keywords have:
Lowest keyword difficulty in Ahrefs/SEMrush
Highest conversion rate from click to pipeline in Google Ads
Lowest acquisition costs (or best LTV:CAC ratio)
These three data points paint a clear picture of which keywords are worth the long-term organic investment.
Our content lead Kim ran this exact process on our own website last year.
She analyzed "performance marketing agency" vs. "growth marketing agency" vs. "demand generation agency." We found that "performance marketing agency" had the highest conversion rate and ROI for us, so we built our organic content strategy around that keyword and now rank in the top 3 in the SERPs.
Instead of spending 6 months building content that doesn't work, you spend 30-90 days testing keywords in paid and get a data-backed answer on which channel you should push investment.
Step 4: Use Organic to Feed Your Paid Engine
This step is for companies with a more mature SEO strategy already ranking for a decent pool of keywords.
The hack is to reverse engineer organic rankings to find pages that convert to pipeline and cross-reference to see if they are currently being used in paid search campaigns.
How to do it:
Open GA4
Go to Reports and filter by Engagement → Landing Pages → Conversions
Find: Conversions (specifically offline conversions like pipeline data for best results)
Open Google Search Console
Analyze performance of high-intent pages
Find: Keywords driving traffic to those pages
You will see your high-converting organic pages and their associated keywords.
Add these keywords to your Google Ads testing engine and then send prospects to those proven high-converting organic pages instead of building new ones.
Repurposing pages for paid campaigns won’t just save time and money. It can also help earn higher Quality Scores in Google Ads. Higher Quality Scores typically deliver 30-50% lower CPCs, which will also drive down your overall pipeline acquisition costs.
A Blended Google Strategy Makes Sense For Marketing ROI
Most B2B brands are trying to get some early wins on the board for Q1 to prove marketing works.
If you treat paid and organic search as separate channels, you risk getting the same siloed results:
Paid search that can't scale
Organic content that doesn't convert
No clear path to prove marketing's pipeline contribution
That’s why I recommend this playbook to KlientBoost clients and run it in our own marketing department. Wins compound month over month and give you the data you need to drive revenue across organic and paid channels.
Need data to justify marketing’s impact on revenue to leadership?
This is the playbook to run.
Hope you've found this useful and I’ll catch ya in the next one!
🤘
Patrick
P.S. If you spend more than $10K/month on Google Ads and struggle to prove which keywords drive pipeline (or if your SEO strategy feels like a shot in the dark), we're running a 90-day SEO sprint for new clients to implement this blended search playbook.
We'll validate what drives pipeline through paid search and then help you build an organic strategy around proven winners. Book a call with our growth strategists to get started 🤝