Should I buy PPC ads if I rank organically?

You have optimised your website, and now it ranks in the top ten for all your major keywords and second page for several others. Of course, the website ranks first position for the brand name.

The question, at this point, is: should you pack in the pay-per-click (PPC) adverts?

You may want to do so, and I normally agree with that, and investing more money on SEA it means ditching them, but hey you may have your own reasons like your organic presence not to be so strong.

But there could be also another reason. Today, while I was working for a customer, I noticed that despite their brand ranking first, they were still investing in PPC adverts. This customer has both a .co.uk (targeting Brits) and .com (more generic, though still focused to English speakers) version of its site.

So why continue to invest money in Ads is good?

When I challenged the PPC account manager, I was told that Brits - like many other people - have a natural bias and prefer to click on the localized TLD

Adidas PPC

I’m not sure whether this is the case, and in spite of what you may think I’m going to say, I still believe that investing money in Ads in such a circumstance is always good.

There could be many reasons, one of them - for example - is the direct control on what in the organic world are known as sitelinks (that in this context are called Ad Sitelinks), making the Ad more prominent thus occupying additional space into the SERP real estate.

However, this requires a proper configuration.

The screenshot is just an example as I cannot disclose the customer’s name, but imagine this scenario: a PPC (without Ad sitelink) pointing to the UK version and the organic result with sitelinks pointing to the .com version.

In a scenario like the one above, an investment in PPC will be not a good one, even though some internal redirects coupled with a user-agent sniff could fix the situation.