For most small businesses, PPC and SEO overlap without anyone noticing. Ads and SEO run as two projects, often with two vendors, and nobody lines them up. So it's normal to find you're paying several dollars a click on a search where you already sit at the top of the free results, while a term that brings in real customers gets no SEO attention because "the ads handle that."
We call the fix an overlap map. You can build a rough one yourself in an afternoon.
A hypothetical, to make it concrete
Say you run a garage door repair company in the Columbus, Ohio, suburbs. The business and every number below are made up, purely to show the logic.
Two things are going on in your account:
- Your own name. You bid on your company name and pay about $1.20 a click for roughly 400 clicks a month. That's around $480 a month. You also rank first organically for your name, with your Google Business Profile right beside it. So that $480 goes on people who were already looking for you.
- "Garage door spring replacement." You pay about $9 a click for 150 clicks a month, so $1,350. Organically you're on page two, because the site has one general "Services" page and nothing about springs.
Neither of these is automatically a mistake. That's why you map them. The right answer depends on what happens when you change something, and you only find that out by testing.
The four boxes
Every search term you care about lands in one of four boxes.
| Your position | You rank well organically | You don't rank well |
|---|---|---|
| You run ads on it | Possible double payment. Test before cutting. | Ads are carrying it. Worth building a page? |
| You don't run ads on it | Fine as is. Keep an eye on it. | A gap. Decide whether it's worth either. |
Top-left is where "paying twice" savings may sit. Top-right is where SEO can take over some of the cost over time. Bottom-right is the to-do list nobody has written yet.
How to build your own map
You need access to Google Ads and Google Search Console, both for the same website.
- Link Search Console to Google Ads, if they aren't linked yet. Google Ads has a paid and organic report that only fills in once the link exists. Google moves menus often, so if you can't find it, search Google's help pages for "paid and organic report" and follow the current steps.
- Pull 90 days of data. From Google Ads, the search terms report: term, clicks, cost, conversions. From Search Console, the Performance report: query, clicks, average position.
- Match the terms. In a spreadsheet, line up search terms from Ads against queries from Search Console. Exact matches first, then close variants. Don't overthink it. You're looking for terms with real money behind them.
- Put each term in a box. Pick a simple rule for "rank well," such as an average position of 3 or better, and apply it consistently.
- Sort by cost. Inside each box, put the most expensive terms at the top. Those decisions are worth making first.
- Write one action per term. Test a pause, keep, build a page, or leave alone. Nothing fancier.
One caution: average position in Search Console is an average across many searches, devices and locations. Treat it as a rough signal, not a seat number.
Brand terms: test, don't assume
People argue about brand bidding a lot. The honest answer is that it depends on who else is bidding on your name.
If no competitor shows ads for your name, pausing your brand campaign may cost you very few customers, because most of those clicks shift to your organic listing. If competitors do bid on your name, your ad may be what keeps you above them. You can't tell which situation you're in from a dashboard.
A simple test:
- See who's bidding. Search your name on your phone and laptop at different times of day. The Auction insights report on your brand campaign in Google Ads shows which other advertisers appear in the same auctions.
- Pick a quiet stretch, 2 to 4 weeks, outside your busy season.
- Pause brand ads, or switch them off in one region if you serve several.
- Watch total brand clicks, paid plus organic, and the leads or sales they bring. Ad clicks will obviously drop to zero; that's not the number that matters.
- Compare with the weeks before. If total clicks and leads hold up, you've found money. If they drop, switch the campaign back on. You've learned it was doing a job.
Results vary a lot by market and season, so keep notes and judge with your own data.
Non-brand terms: when SEO should take over
For a term like the spring-replacement example, the question flips. You're buying clicks you might, over time, earn. A dedicated page that answers the search properly can start to rank: what the job involves, what it usually costs if you can publish that, how fast you can get there. That takes months, not weeks, and nothing guarantees it reaches the top three.
So we don't recommend cutting the ads on day one. The order we prefer:
- Build the page now and point the ads at it. A closer match between search, ad and page often helps the paid side as well.
- Watch the page's position for that term in Search Console.
- As it climbs, test lower bids or tighter match types on that term and check whether total leads hold.
When paying twice is fine
Overlap isn't automatically waste. Good reasons to keep both:
- A competitor takes the ad slot above your organic result the moment you leave.
- You need control of the message: a seasonal offer, a new location, a price change.
- Your organic result points to a page that converts poorly, and the ad goes somewhere better.
- On phones, ads and the map pack can push your first organic result well down the screen.
The map turns these into decisions instead of defaults. That's all it's for.
Where we come in
Our SEO service is built around this overlap, because we usually run the ads too, and we read both accounts side by side every month. If you'd rather have the map done once by someone outside your current setup, the Search + Ads audit covers one site and one ad account: both full audits, the overlap map and a 90-day plan, for $1,690 in 10 business days.
