- Heidi Schwende2 days ago5 min read
We're heading into Q1, which means budget conversations are happening right now. Before you finalize spend on campaigns, content programs, or that shiny new martech platform, get the foundation right first.
Your website excellence, your SEO, and your PPC form the base of your entire online presence. Everything else—social, email, ABM, events—builds on top of that foundation. If the base is shaky, nothing you stack on it will perform the way it should.
And 2026 needs to be the year of the big reset. Too much has changed in how search works, how buyers find information, and how AI is reshaping visibility. The strategies that built your organic traffic in 2022 aren't the strategies that will protect it in 2026. If you're still running the same playbook, you're not holding steady—you're falling behind.
The budget allocation question comes up in almost every initial conversation I have with marketing leaders. They want a percentage. A formula. Something they can plug into a spreadsheet and defend to the CFO.
I get it. But the question itself reveals a problem with how most companies approach channel investment.
The Split Is the Wrong Starting Point
Here's what happens when you lead with "what percentage should go to SEO versus PPC": You've already decided to fund both channels before understanding whether both channels deserve funding right now.
For a mid-market company with a $150K annual digital budget, that's not a theoretical concern. Every dollar has to justify itself. You don't have the luxury of spreading money across channels just to maintain presence.
The better question is: What specific business outcome do you need in the next 90 days, and which channel can actually deliver it?
- If you're launching a new service line and need pipeline by end of quarter, that's a PPC problem. If your sales team is drowning in unqualified leads and you need better prospects, that might be a content and SEO problem. If you're bleeding market share to a competitor who's eating your branded search terms, you might need both—but in a very specific configuration.
If you're launching a new service line and need pipeline by end of quarter, that's a PPC problem.
If your sales team is drowning in unqualified leads and you need better prospects, that might be a content and SEO problem.
If you're bleeding market share to a competitor who's eating your branded search terms, you might need both—but in a very specific configuration.
The Math That Actually Matters
Most budget planning conversations focus on inputs: How much should we spend? The useful conversation focuses on outputs: What will we get, and when?
PPC gives you a relatively predictable equation. You know your cost per click. You know your landing page conversion rate (or you should). You can model what 10,000 clicks will cost and what percentage will convert. The math isn't perfect, but it's math.
SEO doesn't work that way. You're paying for activities—content production, technical fixes, link building—that may or may not produce rankings, which may or may not produce traffic, which may or may not produce conversions. The timeline stretches from months to quarters, and the outcome depends heavily on competitive dynamics you don't control.
This isn't an argument against SEO. It's an argument for being honest about what you're buying. PPC is a vending machine. SEO is planting an orchard. Both can feed you, but one requires patience and the other requires quarters.
The AI Search Complication
Any honest conversation about SEO investment in 2025 has to account for AI Overviews. If you're still measuring SEO success purely by rankings and organic sessions, you're using a dashboard that no longer reflects reality.
Google's AI-generated summaries now answer questions directly on the results page. Your content can rank number one and still lose traffic because users got their answer without clicking. This changes the ROI calculation for certain types of content—particularly informational queries where you were counting on top-of-funnel traffic.
It doesn't mean SEO is dead. It means your SEO strategy needs to evolve. Content structured for AI visibility, schema markup, direct-answer formats, and multimedia assets all require investment. If your SEO budget doesn't account for this shift, you're funding yesterday's playbook.
Ask whoever manages your organic program how they're adapting to AI search. If they don't have a clear answer, that's information worth having before you set budget allocations.
What Mid-Market Companies Get Wrong
Large enterprises can afford to fund SEO as a brand-building exercise with a three-year payback horizon. Venture-backed startups can pour money into paid acquisition to hit growth targets regardless of unit economics.
Mid-market companies—the $5M to $25M revenue range—don't have either luxury. You need channels that produce measurable returns on a timeline that matches your business planning cycle.
This typically means PPC carries more weight in the early stages of a digital program, not because it's better, but because it's faster and more accountable. You can test messaging, validate demand, and build a conversion baseline while SEO gains traction in the background.
The mistake is treating that initial allocation as permanent. Companies that stay PPC-heavy indefinitely end up renting all their traffic, vulnerable to rising CPCs and competitor bidding wars.
The goal is to shift the mix as organic earns its share—but that shift should be based on actual performance data, not arbitrary timelines or industry benchmarks.
The Conversation with Finance
CFOs and boards want predictability. They want to know what a dollar in produces and what comes out the other side. That's reasonable.
PPC answers that question directly. SEO answers it eventually. Your job as a marketing leader is to explain the difference without overselling organic's short-term potential or underselling its long-term value.
Frame it this way:
- PPC is the cost of acquiring customers now. SEO is the investment in reducing that cost over time.
PPC is the cost of acquiring customers now.
SEO is the investment in reducing that cost over time.
Both lines belong on the budget, but they serve different functions and operate on different timelines.
If you're asked to justify SEO spend with immediate ROI metrics, push back. That's like asking why the R&D department didn't generate revenue this quarter. It's the wrong question for the investment type.
A More Useful Framework
Instead of starting with a percentage split, start with three questions:
- What revenue or pipeline target do we need to hit this quarter?That determines your minimum viable PPC investment—the floor required to keep the sales team fed.What competitive position do we need to build over the next 12 months?That shapes your SEO strategy and tells you whether you're playing catch-up, maintaining, or trying to dominate.What happens if PPC costs increase 20% next year? If your answer is "we're in trouble," that's your signal to accelerate organic investment now, before you're forced into it.
What revenue or pipeline target do we need to hit this quarter?
- That determines your minimum viable PPC investment—the floor required to keep the sales team fed.
That determines your minimum viable PPC investment—the floor required to keep the sales team fed.
What competitive position do we need to build over the next 12 months?
- That shapes your SEO strategy and tells you whether you're playing catch-up, maintaining, or trying to dominate.
That shapes your SEO strategy and tells you whether you're playing catch-up, maintaining, or trying to dominate.
What happens if PPC costs increase 20% next year?
- If your answer is "we're in trouble," that's your signal to accelerate organic investment now, before you're forced into it.
If your answer is "we're in trouble," that's your signal to accelerate organic investment now, before you're forced into it.
The right split falls out of those answers. It's not 70/30 or 60/40 because someone wrote an article saying so. It's whatever configuration gives you the short-term results you need while building the long-term assets that reduce your dependence on paid traffic.
Budget allocation between SEO and PPC isn't a math problem with a single correct answer. It's a strategic decision that depends on your business situation, your timeline, and your tolerance for uncertainty.
Get specific about what you need each channel to accomplish. Measure them by standards appropriate to how they actually work. And revisit the allocation quarterly, because the mix that makes sense in January may not make sense in July.
The companies that get this right aren't the ones with the perfect formula. They're the ones willing to adjust based on what the data actually shows.
- SEOPaid Search AdvertisingAdaptive Search Engine
