OddsPoint: Acquisition Cost Down 55% in 12 Months by Running Paid + SEO as One System
How a sports-betting comparison site stitched paid acquisition and organic SEO into a single acquisition engine, and watched blended CAC fall every month for a year.
The Challenge
OddsPoint was running healthy paid campaigns and a separate, slow content team. The two never spoke. Paid was carrying 100% of conversion volume at a CAC the founders knew was unsustainable as the auction got more crowded heading into the football and NBA seasons.
They needed organic to start carrying real conversion weight inside twelve months, not eighteen, and they needed paid CAC to stop climbing in the meantime. The internal debate had been about whether to move budget from paid to SEO. The actual answer was to stop treating them as a budget tradeoff at all.
Our Approach
One canonical keyword universe
We built a single scored keyword list from the Google Ads search-term report, organic Search Console data, and intent-tagged competitor research. Every keyword had paid CPC, organic difficulty, intent tag and current ranking next to it. Both teams worked off the same list, prioritizing the same gaps.
Shared landing-page library
Every commercial page got built once, with a paid-traffic variant and an organic-traffic variant served off the same component library. Paid-side A/B tests promoted winners back into the canonical organic page. Organic-side schema enrichment lifted Quality Score on the paid variant.
Programmatic SEO for long-tail comparison queries
OddsPoint's natural surface area was thousands of ' vs ' and ' bonus' queries. We built a programmatic page system seeded with structured operator data, freshness-monitored, and internally linked, generating 3,800 indexable pages in the first quarter.
Brand-search loop fed by paid display + YouTube
Paid display and YouTube created branded-search demand. Organic captured branded queries at near-zero CPC. Branded organic traffic was the single biggest source of net-new low-CAC conversions by month nine.
Execution Timeline
Results
- ✓Blended CAC fell 55% from baseline, measured as total acquisition spend (paid + SEO retainer) divided by total conversions.
- ✓Organic sessions grew 2.4× over twelve months as programmatic indexation matured.
- ✓Organic accounted for 47% of total conversions in month 12, up from under 8% at start.
- ✓Paid spend stayed roughly flat in absolute terms but moved up the funnel into demand-generation work as bottom-funnel demand started arriving organically.
Results
The combination of paid ads and SEO from Unled has been a game-changer. Immediate traffic from ads plus long-term organic growth. Acquisition cost down 55%.
What This Engagement Taught Us
- ›Paid versus SEO is the wrong frame. Paid feeds SEO and SEO feeds paid; operate them on one team or the compounding does not happen.
- ›Programmatic SEO is the highest-leverage organic motion in any vertical with combinatorial query surface area (comparisons, bonuses, location-based listings).
- ›Brand search demand is the cheapest acquisition channel that exists, and it is created by mid-funnel paid spend.
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