They answer different questions
SEM buys presence today for queries with commercial intent. SEO compounds presence over quarters and defends it cheaply once earned. Treating them as competitors for the same budget line produces bad decisions in both.
For B2B, where an enquiry may take three to nine months to close, the right question is not which channel is cheaper but which one you can afford to stop.
A default allocation to start from
For a company with limited organic presence and a real sales team, we usually recommend the following starting split, revisited quarterly.
- Paid search on high-intent, bottom-of-funnel keywords, tightly capped
- Organic investment in the ten to fifteen pages that map to real buying decisions
- Content depth over content volume, one substantive page per distinct intent
- Remarketing to visitors who reached pricing, product or case-study pages
- Social used for credibility and hiring, measured on assisted influence rather than last click
Attribution that survives a long sales cycle
Last-click attribution systematically under-credits organic and over-credits the final branded search. In B2B this leads to defunding the channel that created demand.
The fix is unglamorous: capture first-touch source on the lead record in the CRM, keep it immutable, and report conversion by first touch alongside last touch. Once both numbers are on the same page, budget arguments get shorter.
What to report monthly
Cost per qualified enquiry by source, organic impressions and clicks for the target keyword set, position movement for commercial terms, and pipeline value by first-touch source. Four numbers, one page, every month.
Planning something similar for your organisation?
Talk to the InfozIT team about your CRM, HRMS, ERP, product or engineering requirement.