SEO and
PPC should go together like peas and carrots when it comes to your digital marketing strategy.
SEO focuses on the long-term growth of traffic and establishing yourself as a Hall of Famer in the eyes of Google. PPC, on the other hand, looks to deliver instant results and drive customers immediately to your desired content.
61% of marketers say that improving their SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority, however, when it comes to your marketing strategy, learning to use both PPC and SEO can be particularly effective.
We will uncover exactly how
SEO and PPC can work hand-in-hand and how you can use that to drive more traffic and leads to your website.
What are SEO and PPC?
Before we dive into how these two marketing strategies can work together in their own unique marketing formulae, let’s briefly brush over the differences between the two.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO or
search engine optimization is the process of organically ranking in Google and other search engines without the use of ads. The two biggest factors for success in SEO are link building and high-quality content.
SEO allows you to build traffic over time that keeps on coming without the need to pay for ads; basically, it’s a long-term payoff.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
PPC or
pay-per-click, which is also sometimes called cost-per-click, is a form of digital advertising that website owners use to bring traffic directly to a website.
This usually works when a website owner pays at a cost per click for every user that visits their website through Google, Bing, and other search engines and social media platforms. PPC allows you to deliver traffic to your site instantly, but at a cost.
The Top Digital Marketing Strategies That Compliment Both SEO and PPC
Many people settle for focusing on just SEO or PPC, yet the smartest marketers and business owners will know that a combination of the two different techniques will give you the best results.
When used together, the powerful impact of PPC and SEO can benefit your site massively, especially when it comes to traffic. These are some of the best
digital marketing strategies to use to pair both SEO and PPC together for maximum effectiveness in your next campaign.
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Content Marketing Inspiration
When you are using the Google Display Network, you are able to place AdWords ads on other sites next to any content that matches. The Google Display Network can be an amazing way to get inspiration for your own content you are producing.
For example, you can check up on which pages have the highest click-through rate on any of your ads, whichever that one is could be a perfect topic for your upcoming
blog post on your site.
You can even set up to run a regular placement report to give you a whole host of brilliant content marketing inspiration for your blog topics. Using the data that you collect from your AdWords account, you can both ensure that your PPC is appearing next to content that helps your ads get noticed while simultaneously cultivating a library of solid content for your own website!
Data is always king: the more of it you have, the more of an informed choice you can make. When you have access to geographical data in Google Analytics, you can sort your SEO traffic by conversion and geographical data.
This allows you to come up with a complete bidding strategy in your PPC based on the data. For example, if you saw that your company sold more products in a particular region of the country, you could increase your bids in that area to be more aggressive in that market. You can even set bid adjustments within an AdWords Enhanced Campaign for specific zip codes, cities, and other geographic areas.
Additionally, as you see which geographical areas your AdWords dollars are making the most difference in, you can begin to shift your SEO towards those markets, ensuring that you’re optimized for those areas and making the most of your organic rankings along with your PPC.
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Ad Copy and Meta Description Effectiveness
Whether you are looking at PPC or SEO, a big digital marketing strategy is to increase your click-through-rate (CTR). Click-through-rate is the number of clicks over the number of impressions. In SEO, a higher CTR will allow you to bring in more traffic and can improve rankings. For PPC, a high CTR will lead to an improvement in your quality score, which leads to reduced bidding costs and a better ad position.
Whether your main focus is on PPC or SEO, the best way that you can improve your CTR is through effective meta descriptions. A meta description is the webpage description that appears in the search results under the link. You can use the meta description to sell to your user by focusing on:
- The price,
- A prominent call-to-action,
- Asking the user a question,
- Seasonal ad copy, or
- Highlighting your unique selling point.
If you take a look at both your PPC and SEO campaigns, you can get a better idea of what’s working and what isn’t. You can utilize your PPC campaign descriptions to see what copy is working better than others and then use that to change your meta descriptions.
One of the best things about using both SEO and PPC is that you can completely dominate the search engine results pages (SERPs) for a particular keyword or search term. If you have a lot of direct competition or a particular competitor that is muscling in on your target audience, you can fight back hard with both your PPC and organic rankings.
By getting the first few ad spots and the first few organic search results, you can make up almost half of the total SERPs for a particular keyword or search term. This means that you have the highest chance of receiving a lot of the clicks for that search term.
This means, you also are lowering the chance of your competitor being able to get traffic for that particular term too.
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Paid Report versus Organic AdWords Report
A final favorite digital marketing strategy for using both PPC and SEO together is analyzing your AdWords reports. Using the paid and organic AdWords reports, you can gain information on how successful a particular term is when it ranks with both paid results and organic traffic.
This allows you to compare and analyze how well your mixed marketing techniques can work compared to individually using both of the techniques.
Time to Mix Up Your SEO and PPC Marketing
Both SEO and PPC digital marketing strategies can work effectively on their own, but if you combine the immediate results of PPC with the long-term benefits of SEO, you can deliver a powerful marketing mix for your business and website.
Do you use PPC ads on top of a search engine optimization strategy? What kind of results have you seen?
Tags: Digital Marketing • Paid Search Marketing • Strategy & Consulting
