Written by Izabela Wisniewska
SEO and PPC – there seems to be a lot of debate as to which one is better. However, personally I don’t think it’s matter of choice. From my experience, the most successful digital marketing campaigns are these which combine multiple traffic sources, organic, paid and social. Today, I’m going to talk about how Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click can work together.
Search Visibility & Traffic
This is one of the first things we (SEO specialists) often aim for. Organic visibility gives us coveted spots on the ” first 10 blue links” or at least somewhere close.
However the results often look different nowadays with blended results and ads. And behold, there are PPC ads on top of organic results. So even if we can manage to get our client in the first position for certain keywords, what we have to remember about is that somewhere above that organic results, very often there will be PPC result, and some of the traffic will be going to that ad. The solution is quite simple, consider using PPC in addition to your SEO even for your well performing organic keywords. Of course, you have to test it, see what results and Return on Investment is there. Do the returns justify your PPC spend? The situation is similar with branded searches, of course you are going to rank organically for your branded terms but there is again a possibility of PPC ads from your competitors taking away some of that potential traffic. The solution is to bid on your branded keyword to ensure page one domination for your branded terms.
One more smart way to use PPC and SEO together to bring more traffic, use PPC for keywords that do not rank organically just yet. Once your organic rankings kick in, you will be able to reduce your PPC spend.
Keyword Data
Unfortunately since Google has introduced the ‘not provided’ in Google Analytics, we do not get too much information on keywords from organic search. Google is making it difficult for us.
However, if we run a Pay Per Click campaign, we can get the search query data and use it for SEO. Knowing which keywords convert, which keywords people use when they are searching for our products or services simply makes our lives easier.
PPC Experiments
We all have been there. We are coming up with that brilliant call to action or keyword idea, we are implementing it, and… and there is nothing. We need to wait for Google to crawl and rank the page. With PPC we can experiment with new keywords, call to action etc, and have the results almost in real time. This will give us an idea if it has got a chance to work for organic search or if our idea maybe wasn’t so great. You can also use PPC traffic to test your conversion rate optimisation on your landing pages. It makes more sense than waiting for organic rankings only to discover that your visitors leave the website without buying.
PPC for content marketing
Yes, there is a content marketing here as well. We all keep hearing about importance of great , big content. The problem is, we all hear that and we all do it. There are many of us -reducing content. All these makes it difficult for our content to stand out. Pay Per Click can help. If you have great piece of content which have massive potential of attracting links, shares etc and you do have some PPC budget left, use it to promote your content, it can amplify your content and have incredible effect on your organic search.
Remarketing
You got to the first page and the to the first position. Yes, you already feel invincible, but there is one more thing. Our clients care more about actual sales than the position in Google’s search results. According to kissmetrics, 96% people visiting your site are not ready to buy. That’s a lot of people. However, we can’t just simply let them go. It would be great if there was a way to remind them about us in some time while they are browsing the web. Fortunately, there is one. Welcome to remarketing campaigns. In your Adwords Campaign, target people who have already visited your site, go even step further and show them the products they have seen on the site. Simply, get them back. You are not limited to Google Adwords here, there are other platforms including Facebook which you can use for remarketing.
Summary
As you can see there are many reasons to use Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click together. It’s not a question of which one should you be using but how to make them complement each other.
