I am sure, like me, that you have read tens of articles on the internet concerning what source of online traffic you should invest in out of pay per click advertising (PPC) and search engine optimisation (SEO). The truth to the matter is that there is no right or wrong answer: it depends what you are trying to advertise – in essence, it actually depends completely on the ‘business plan‘ of your campaign. Saying this, the general idea is that PPC and SEO work better not separated but combined together to produce synergy-like results. Here is why.

From reading one of the articles about PPC and SEO on PPC.org, you will gather that:

• PPC works best when you want fast traffic and have a large budget to work with.
• SEO works best when you have a low budget, a lot of time and want consistent amounts of traffic in the long run.

So, just from this simple breakdown of PPC and SEO, you should already be starting to see how both PPC and SEO can be used together for better results.

Using PPC and SEO Together Strategy

To gain the best results from SEO and PPC, PPC should be used mostly at the start of your marketing campaign. This is because this is the part where you will have next to nothing in terms of SEO traffic. Although this will be costly, it will enable you to gain a good amount of traffic quickly and hassle-free.

While your PPC campaign is bringing in traffic in the short term, during this time, you can concentrate your efforts on SEO. Therefore, although only PPC is bringing you traffic, the fact that PPC does not require much time means the majority of your effort in the short run will be put into SEO.

Naturally, as time passes and you consistently keep working with SEO (while maintaining the level of performance of your PPC campaign), you will start to bring in traffic from SEO. This is the moment where you may require a change over in terms of who is bringing in the traffic. Once you start gaining traffic with SEO, slowly but surely you can start to reduce the budget set aside for PPC, resulting in less traffic being generated from PPC sources. Once the transition has been completed, you should find yourself with your PPC campaign on pause and your SEO campaign fully running, brining in roughly the same amount of traffic your PPC campaign first brought in at the very start.

Although the only time you use PPC and SEO together is during the transitioning period, the fact PPC frees up time for advertisers means kick starting your SEO while running a PPC campaign produces the best results.