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We recently read this article that breaks down Glossier's Google Ads strategy and to say we were blown away by the findings would be an understatement.

Store Growers writer and founder Dennis Moons reveals their campaign structure and breaks down all the types of ads the company runs on Google. In the end, he found Glossier making a gross profit of $ 156,000 / month! Sounds crazy right?

Moons' in-depth analysis made me think about how we've never talked about how closely SEO and paid traffic really are on the DM blog. While Glossier's strategy and bottom line on Google Ads are impressive, it's equally impressive that almost all of its search strategy has been based on branded keywords.

*Note: "Brand keywords "means that someone already knows the brand when searching on Google. For example, someone entering “DigitalMarketer Certification” clearly already has an awareness of DigitalMarketer so this is considered a branding term. However, someone who enters a "Digital Marketing Certification" has no clear awareness of our brand so the keyword is not branded.

It's a controversial topic, but when you dive into the data you can clearly see how much money can affect organic traffic and ranking.

Ask me how do I know. When I was working as an SEO manager in a technology company, the SEO team broke records left and right. In fact, we were doing so well that the CMO told us he would buy us lunch at the restaurant of our choice every time we broke another record. We obviously loved it (mostly because the organic traffic boosted WoW so we rolled out for another free lunch every week). Yeah, I'd say we sat pretty.

The problem was, the paid advertising team kept growing … let's just say excited (rightly if we're honest). They knew the work they were doing actually affected our numbers. While paid search traffic didn't surge to record levels, the ads they served led to a surge in organic traffic. And the SEO team took full advantage.

To prove a point, one of the members of the paid search team decided to shut down their channel and stop showing ads for 24 hours.

* Cue chaos *

Turning off a paid channel (even for a short time) at a large technology company can and will have a major impact. Organic traffic decreased almost immediately. And since our efforts to find problems were unsuccessful, we were ready to believe we were affected by the latest Google algorithm update.

Unfortunately, after our paid search counterpart got us confused long enough, they turned their channel back on … and almost immediately the organic traffic got back up.

Point proved.

Of course, I'm not saying that paid advertising completely controls organic search (my background is in search engine optimization, after all), but this is an important factor. And while SEO efforts are obviously important, if the strategy works in conjunction with paid search efforts, you can get results faster!

In the Glossier strategy, Moons points out that the Glossier product line contains generic name structures that make it easier for them to appear not only in organic search but also in Google Ads. This is an almost ingenious marketing ploy …

Yes. Nine out of ten of their top keywords are branded. However, it doesn't really matter if your branded terms have a monthly search volume of around 550,000. But all that brand awareness had to come from somewhere … hmmm, I wonder if it came from an original strategy that generated organic traffic. 🤔

According to this Business Insider article, Emily Weiss, CEO and founder of Glossier, started a blog called Into the Gloss back in 2010. As a contributor to Vogue, the blog was created to discuss her experience with the beauty brands as she felt they did not adequately represent women and their needs. She interviewed top celebrities and beauty brands, and the website quickly grew into a community of women discussing their experiences with makeup and the beauty industry.

The rest is history, of course. Weiss received support from Forerunner Capital and Glossier was born in 2014.

However, the EXTREMELY important detail in this story is that Weiss organically blogged to talk about an industry that they think needs improvement. She had questions about the problems women were facing and her website became a sensation because other women resonated with her and had the same questions.

Take a look at the first few years of Into the Gloss organic rankings:

In its prime, the blog ranked for over 480,000 keywords! For context, DigitalMarketer's all-time record is around 35,000 keywords. This is exponential organic growth that Weiss built and which then enabled her to bring Glossier to market.

My favorite part of the Glossier story, of course, is that the strategy that launched one of the biggest beauty brands has been implemented at DM in recent years, even though it hasn't been calculated.

I think one of our contributors, Rachel Miller, actually said it best. "The content doesn't matter if there's no conversation to follow.”

That is exactly what Weiss did. She built a brand around the conversations women were already having. If you take a look at Glossier's about page, you'll find that they are still focused on the same idea:

"Now we're building the future beauty company where everything we do starts with you. We create the products you tell us you'd like. We believe in thoughtful design and enable conversation (this is where it all starts Above all, we believe that beauty is about having fun no matter where you are on your journey. "

I think it's clear that the company needed both the organic and the paid strategy to be successful. The same applies to DigitalMarketer. When I started as SEO Manager in 2018, this was one of the first charts I sent to the team while reviewing the website.

As you can see, this is the correlation between paid spend and organic traffic from 2017 to the end of 2018. It was clear that while we continued to cut spend on paid Facebook and Google ads, we saw a continued decline in organic traffic.

The solution to such a situation is not necessarily to increase spending. The health of our organic intercourse still needed help. After all, it's a one-way street, both paid and organic have to work properly for one to help the other.

Our first step was creating content for search that should lead to conversation. We created pieces like:

These are just a few of the posts we've created on the questions and conversations marketers have had. And all of these posts worked very well because we knew they were topics that our audience really cares about.

After realizing our organic search strategy, we knew it was the right time to increase spending on our paid channels.

Our paid strategy for Facebook and Google has also been carefully planned. We created ads for different awareness areas so we can continue conversations with prospects at different stages of the funnel.

This meant that some of our ads were aimed at the types of content discussed above, while other ads were designed to create magnets for those further down the customer journey. The whole idea was that while we could optimize for organic, we still needed the paid search aspect so our strategy could go beyond that.

Glossier did the same. While it's clear that their focus isn't that much on the organic side of things anymore, it doesn't really have to be that way.

As a marketer, you will find that once you start developing your own strategies, once you have achieved certain goals, the efforts will be better used in other areas … like Google Ads, which are making $ 156,000 a month in profit ! That's not to say that some channels aren't important, just that there is a time and place for every marketing strategy.

*Note: I want to mention that it would obviously still be beneficial for Glossier to focus on organic search. While brand awareness is there, these unbranded searches have clear options. 😉

Yes, while Google Ads are a big part of Glossier's history, organic search has made a huge contribution too. To be successful, you need to implement both a paid and organic strategy. Using the two strategies together can help your business grow to new heights!