We are here at eTail Palm Springs and seeing and hearing the latest and greatest in e-commerce and retail.
Retailers are constantly shifting budgets between paid search and SEO—but are they missing opportunities by treating them as separate silos? In 2025, with search evolving faster than ever, the real question isn’t “which channel is better?”—it’s “how can they work together for maximum growth?”
Today, I’m joined by Matt Shenton, Biddable Director at Croud, a digital marketing expert who has helped retail brands like Every Man Jack, Creed, Nespresso, All Saints, and Vans optimize their paid and organic search strategies. With search becoming more complex in 2025, Matt is here to break down how retailers can balance paid search and SEO to drive real performance growth.
Resources
Croud: https://croud.com/
eTail Palm Springs: https://etailwest.wbresearch.com/
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Transcript
This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Greg Kihlstrom:
We are here at eTel Palm Springs and seeing and hearing the latest and greatest in e-commerce and retail. Retailers are constantly shifting budgets between paid search and SEO, but are they missing opportunities by treating them as separate silos? In 2025, with search evolving faster than ever, the real question isn’t which channel is better, it’s how can they work together for maximum growth? Today I’m joined by Matt Shenton, Biddable Director at Croud, a digital marketing expert who has helped brands like Amazon Prime Video, Olympus, Skillshare, and Clear optimize their paid and organic search strategies. With search becoming more complex in 2025, Matt’s here to break down how retailers can balance paid search and SEO to drive real performance growth. Matt, welcome to the show.
Matt Shenton: Hi Greg, thanks for having me.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in, though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Croud?
Matt Shenton: Yeah, sure. So I’m a paid media director at Croud, a marketing agency based in New York with offices in the UK. I’ve been with the company about eight years, and I would say my specialism is paid search, but cover most paid media channels. And yeah, I’ve been at ETL for a couple of days, had a lot of great conversations and looking forward to getting stuck into this particular subject, which is top of mind for a lot of retailers.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I know. And I love being able to meet. I do so many like remote recordings here for the show. So it’s nice to actually meet in person and interface and as well as hear all the content at the show here. So We’re going to talk about a few things, but definitely want to start with the 2024 search landscape. Certainly, you know, lots of things changing with AI, with all sorts of things kind of in the mix. But what are some of the major challenges that online retailers faced, you know, in 2024 and now in 2025 when trying to balance paid search and SEO and anything from algorithm updates, paid search costs, all of the above? Yeah, I mean, those two are probably the main ones.
Matt Shenton: But I think firstly, just to acknowledge 2024 incredibly disruptive for search, because like every year, the rate of change is accelerating. And it can very quickly feel like you sort of lose control of certain platforms. I think From an SEO perspective, the algorithm changes, zero click searches, AI overviews, disruption from platforms like Perplexity taking market share. Those have all been the main challenges. We’re hearing a lot of retailers say organic traffic is down year over year. That’s a big concern. And then from the paid side, you mentioned it there, but just increased costs. I think that’s stemming from those platforms really pushing to bring in better first party data, better conversion data. So you then go after higher value customers. What that means is then there’s an increase in CPC because everyone’s doing that. And so those costs are rising. And so the downside there is that if you’re not doing that, then you’re just seeing rising costs and flat decreasing conversions. So I’d say those are the two challenges. And I think Because of that, and those two challenges being quite unique to those two different channels, the two have maybe become more siloed than before, because it’s just harder to figure out how to bring those two together now, because the problems within each feel quite unique and different. And so we’re speaking to a lot of retailers and finding that, yeah, they’re kind of struggling to bring the two back together because of those challenges.
Greg Kihlstrom: Well, and I would imagine part of bringing them together is finding the right balance between, you know, how much focus, how much, I mean, budget looks a little different when you talk about organic versus paid, but it’s still, there’s resources to be allocated. Are retailers, are they getting it right? Are they getting the balance wrong? And what are some of the common mistakes that a retailer might make when trying to prioritize or just find that balance?
Matt Shenton: Yeah, I think it comes down to short-term strategies versus long-term. Obviously, SEO is more of a long-term strategy, paid more short-term. And I think there’s definitely been an over-reliance on performance channels and bottom of funnel conversion driving tactics. And that’s meant that those longer term SEO strategies have sometimes been neglected. Retailers have not had great content strategies or already focused on their SEO strategy as much. It’s been more about the paid side. And what happens there is that They then are too reliant on those bottom of funnel conversion tactics. And over time, they see declining organic and then rising paid media costs. And that’s that’s what we’re seeing for some retailers who’ve got that balance wrong, which is a tricky situation to be in.
Greg Kihlstrom: Right. Right. And so, you know, you mentioned the just now the cost is sort of an outcome of that. Are there any other signs or symptoms that a retailer might be over-relying on one or the other?
Matt Shenton: Yeah, I would say flat to declining overall conversion or revenue and then just increasing costs. That is the telltale sign. And that goes back to what I mentioned there about, you know, those long-term strategies, SEO falling off, you know, what’s happened to my SEO traffic over time, brand getting pushed down, those paid ads appearing more above the fold. Yeah, I would say it’s really just about declining or flat revenue and increasing cost is the telltale sign. Got it.
Greg Kihlstrom: Got it. Okay. So let’s talk a little bit more about investing in paid search versus SEO. When should a retailer invest more in paid search, you know, of the two? You know, what kind of products, promotions, categories, you know, are there any things where it’s just clear they’re going to benefit from paid search?
Matt Shenton: Yeah, I think everyone’s pretty aware of the tactics that work best from a conversion driving point of view within Google Ads. So, you know, performance max, broad match in many cases, DSA, standard shopping for some retailers. I think that’s kind of the baseline. Everyone has to do those. You have to feed good conversion data. If you’re not doing that, then you’re definitely going to get left behind. Outside of that, it’s really about diversifying. And this is kind of the really the theme that we’re trying to get across is diversifying that media mix, whether it’s organic or paid, but even within paid, diversifying, and even within Google Ads, diversifying, because, sure, PMAX, standard shopping, you know, keyword, core keyword search, it’s great, good driving conversions. There’s other tactics that also do well, but just have to be measured in a slightly different way. Demand Gen, YouTube, diversifying into these other tactics that, you know, slightly longer term in terms of payback or different measurement frameworks, But you’ve got to expand into these other tactics because it just doesn’t work to just focus on the easy stuff anymore, just Pmax alone. You’ve got to diversify.
Greg Kihlstrom: And what do you think is holding brands back from diversifying? Has it just been made too easy to do certain things? Or like, what are you seeing?
Matt Shenton: Yeah, I think it does come down to measurement framework. Sometimes it’s about marketing philosophy as well, but a lot of it is measurement framework. If you’re relying on a last-click model, then you’re going to be prioritizing potentially non-incremental or just a very small subset of bottom-of-funnel conversion driving tactics, getting a good MCA model. And then, lots of talk on this yesterday, actually, in detail. the sort of progression of measurement framework from MTA to then MMM to incrementality. And like, you’re getting quite advanced there in terms of marketing measurement, but that’s really how you articulate within your own business, like how to, you know, if you’re trying to sell this to leadership, how you then diversify media into areas that are not always great from like a last click attribution point of view.
Greg Kihlstrom: So you talked a bit about kind of the short-term versus the long-term. I guess, you know, how should brands be thinking about that? What do you think is causing this focus maybe on short term over long term? Or do you see it that way? Is the organic being done or not being done at the expense of more focus on paid search? Or is it just kind of not an understanding of how the two kind of work together?
Matt Shenton: I’d say it’s probably more the former than the latter. So yeah, coming back to it’s just very easy to set these, or not very easy, but relatively easy now to set these platforms up to drive conversions and revenue. And so that does take away some of the focus. And there’s been a period of time where there’s been headroom in those products to continue to grow. But what we’re seeing now is that You know, there’s just, retailers are hitting diminishing returns for those campaign types, those paid media channels more quickly. And they may have neglected their SEO and content strategy because, you know, sometimes that can get expensive. It’s a longer payback. And so I think just, you know, the pressure to hit numbers and drive more revenue, some of that focus on budget has probably gone to the shorter term tactics. And that’s worked for a little bit, but now we’re getting to a stage where that’s coming back to bite a few retailers.
Greg Kihlstrom: And so I’ve seen how, in some cases, paid search can inform a longer-term organic strategy. What about the reverse, though? Can organic SEO insights inform paid search strategies? Yes, for sure.
Matt Shenton: And I think this is one of the things that we’re talking about more. And it’s really interesting because with the way search is changing, you know, becoming more conversational, we’re seeing huge increase in like mid to long tail searches. Why that’s interesting is because with a good SEO, good content strategy, you’re using the sources in that, data sources, to see those search terms. That can then inform content on landing pages. And then if you’re hands on keyboard in Google, you’ll know that some of these campaign tactics, they use a lot of landing page signals to figure out what to match to. So if you are focusing on getting the right data from your organic, seeing the change in search behavior, creating content around that, putting that on a landing page, that helped then improve paid from a matching perspective. So I think the way that’s all developing and evolving is these two things, paid and organic, are going to come back together again because they are very closely linked. And just lastly on the paid side, again, if your hand’s on keyboard, you know that we’re losing control to or potentially eventually losing patrol to select individual keywords. So it is going to become more about what signals the system can use. And that’s probably going to be landing pages, which comes back to content, technical SEO. So yeah, I think over the next 12 months, those channels are going to be forced together, which is really interesting.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Well, and To talk maybe a little bit about the signals part, what about the reporting aspect of this and how reporting tools are playing into both paid and organic? So how are you seeing AI-powered reporting tools? you know, whether it’s reducing manual effort or just, you know, improving some of the reporting and insights.
Matt Shenton: Yeah. At Croud, we’ve developed a number of tools to help advertisers with this. So we have a product called Unity, which brings together paid and organic data and just creates that holistic view at a keyword level. And that’s great because it means that we can make strategic decisions based on what’s costing a lot of money and paid. We’re not ranking very well for organic, but has high commercial value. Let’s change our content strategy based on that and vice versa. If we’re ranking really well in organic, do we need to be there and paid particularly for brand? So having all that data together, It’s really, really useful to make those decisions. We then also have a couple of tools that will pick out data within search term data. So we have tools that find patterns in keyword data within Google to then figure out, you know, what’s the kind of, the way people are searching for this product or service. How is that changing over time? What are the keywords and phrases? How do we then use that in our content strategy? How do we use that on landing pages and ad copy? So we have a number of tools that do that, but it’s really about So A, bringing that data together for the two to understand where’s one doing well versus the other to then figure out trade-offs and cannibalization. And then the other is like surfacing those deeper level search term insights to use in content and ads.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean, that seems valuable because I know there’s tools that do organic and you can log into Google or whatever and see, but like having those in one place it I mean it’s one of those things that it it sounds obvious when you say it but it’s like the that’s great that’s great to hear that that’s that’s possible because yeah I based on what you’re saying there’s there’s a nice complimentary relationship here even though I know a lot of companies, they have these siloed teams that are, you know, one team is solely focused on organic versus paid, but, you know, being able to tie those together, I would imagine this is also something that, you know, things as, and you’ve mentioned sort of some of the changes with, I mean, you know, anything from like Google’s, the search generative experience to perplexity to, you know, all the AI tools are doing search in some way. How are these things, you know, how do you see this changing search even this year? Yeah, it’s a great question.
Matt Shenton: I think rather boringly, it does come back to fundamentals or just like foundational things that we’ve been talking about for a long time. You know, just good SEO, good technical SEO, good content. It’s incredibly easy now to create massive content, but it’s usually pretty poor. And I think the algorithms are generally able to suss out what is, you know, written by an AI. So the importance of like human created, sincere targeted content is really important. I think if you’re not, focusing on that in some way, then that’s gonna impact organic campaigns. And how that then impacts things like new search platforms like Perplexity, which are using lots of different sources, but it’s all content, it’s all written content. Well, it’s not all written, it’s also image and video, which we’ve not touched on, but it’s also super important. I think if you’re not focusing on that, it’s gonna get pretty tricky.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, definitely. As we’re wrapping up here, you know, if there’s one more, you know, one more either a takeaway or maybe it’s talking about video, but, you know, what would you recommend retailers be paying attention to?
Matt Shenton: I’d really pay attention to the platforms and channels you’re relying on too heavily. Like diversifying is going to be key. You know, a bit of a boring answer, but I think we have seen too many people focus on a small number of platforms. And you’re heavily reliant on those platforms. If there’s a change, it can really hurt your business. So diversifying is going to be super important. And it’s going to get interesting. You know, platforms like Perplexity, I think I saw they announced they’re creating their own browser, Comet. which is coming soon, so that may lead to more market share we take away from Google. So actually we’re going to have more opportunities to diversify within search, which is great, but it’s about staying on top of those developments, understanding how they work from a ranking point of view. And if you can do that in-house, great. But otherwise, just, you know, get a good agency like Krav to help you do that, to stay on top of it. Because that’s all I do. I just, I stay on top of this. It’s all I care about. And I think LinkedIn’s a great source for that.
Greg Kihlstrom: Wonderful. Well, Matt, thanks again for joining. One last question for you before we wrap up. I like to ask this to everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Matt Shenton: Yeah, I guess I kind of alluded to it a little bit just then, but LinkedIn’s a great source. There’s so many great creators on there that are really in the detail, myself included. I think also just staying curious. You know, I think it can be very easy to feel like there’s a lot of new products coming around and it can feel like you have to keep an eye on everything. So it can be difficult to know what to focus on. But I think if you kind of a pretty methodical approach to like, you know, what is really taking market share? How is search behavior changing? Yeah, I think speaking with people in the industry is how I do that most, and LinkedIn’s a great source for that.
