Many tend to treat SEO and PPC as separate entities, but this could be holding back digital marketing efforts. There are many cross-overs between SEO and PPC, which can be used to significantly increase online presence and reach sales conversion goals.
1. Portray a Dominant Presence
When your product or service appears as the first ad result and first organic result for a search term - that's a powerful combination. It shows a level of dominance that suggests you’re an extremely established player in your industry.
For SEO, the fact is that even if you rank number one for your target keyword, there are still likely to be ads that appear above your search result. When ads show up, your top ranking page is 30% less likely to win the click than when no ads are present.
This is why we see brands running PPC campaigns on competitors’ branded searches. Even though someone might search “Coca Cola,” an ad gives “Pepsi” a chance to steal that click away. If this can happen on your own branded terms, then think about what it can do to your target keywords.
Often, when a company reaches its goal of ranking number one for an important keyword they think it’s time to turn off the PPC ads. When your SEO and PPC work in tandem, it portrays a dominant presence that can bring a huge boost to your digital marketing results.
2. Become All-Encompassing
Making a sale isn’t easy. The customer goes through a multi-stage buyer journey that’s rarely completed in one or two visits.
Someone may have clicked on your paid ad and loved the landing page, but it’s still not quite enough to earn the sale. That person will go away and think about their decision, do a little bit more research, and, "hopefully", come back to you.
If you’re using SEO to dominate your target keywords, then you’re taking the word "hopefully" and turning it into "probably." When your customer does further research and the first thing they see in the organic listing is your helpful guide, then it’s going to reinforce your authority in their mind.
Your PPC ad has put your brand in their mind and now begins the relationship that you want to push to the next level using SEO.
In some cases, the search listing creates the initial brand awareness while clicking on a paid ad starts the sales journey. Regardless of the order, the main goal is an all-encompassing presence where you are there at every step of the customer journey.
3. Fuse Short-Term and Long-Term Data
One of the challenges with SEO is that it takes time to develop.
While you’re working to grow your presence, you’re collecting limited data to work with. However, when the traffic starts to flow, it can give you some incredible insights into how your target audience operates and the types of content that attracts them.
On the other end of the scale, PPC can give you immediate insights. Your ads can be set up in hours and immediately reach your audience. This allows you to see how people respond to your titles, meta descriptions, copy, and CTAs, which in turn can be leveraged to support your SEO efforts.
PPC and SEO give you slightly different insights but if the two don’t work together, you don’t get a complete picture.
While you’re building your organic presence, the data you collect from PPC ads can be invaluable. Likewise, when you’re getting consistent organic traffic, you’re going to gain valuable insights that can help streamline implementation of your PPC campaigns.
4. Dig Deeper Into Your Target Audience
One of the great things about PPC advertising is you can be incredibly specific about who you target. Through social media, you can choose to target people by demographics, location, language, interests, occupation, and many other variables.
Another major advantage of PPC is its ability to improve SEO results. By analyzing which search terms resulted in the desired click, you can laser-focus SEO campaigns on those keywords which you know have already brought results. Likewise, it also indicates which content types and messages are the most effective at turning website visitors into leads.
Not to mention that it is a brilliant way to learn more about and better define your target audience.
For example, you could target 24-year-old males in San Jose who like Quidditch. By testing different ads and landing pages, you can quickly build up a picture of what works and what doesn’t work for this demographic.
This is great information for your SEO strategy. If 24-year-old males in San Jose who like Quidditch are your ideal customer, then you can learn what they respond to and how you can best reach them.
Incorporate those keywords into high-quality content, and you’ve got a sales journey ready for your target customer.
5. Get a Better Understanding of Search Intent
SEO is incredibly competitive. To get to the top of the results page, you’ve got to do a great job at selecting the right keywords and understanding the user’s search intent.
It’s a different story with PPC, where even a mediocre ad still appears at the top of the page, and will inevitably get clicks. The problem is, if your ads don’t match the search intent of the user, you may get lots of visitors that don't turn into leads resulting in large monthly advertising budgets with limited ROI to show for it.
This is made more difficult by the fact that PPC ads can be challenging to implement. Most people choose a few target keywords and allow Google to broadly match them to other search terms. While Google might have sophisticated algorithms, it still means your ads might be showing up for search terms where the user intent doesn’t match your products and services.
SEO, on the other hand, absolutely has to understand the user’s search intent, otherwise, the pages will never rank. This means your SEO team will have a deep understanding of how your target audience searches and these insights can be key to implementing successful PPC campaigns.
By sharing knowledge between your teams, data collected from SEO results can make your PPC campaigns much more effective.
Conclusion: Make SEO and PPC Work Together
To maximize your digital marketing investment, you must make sure SEO and PPC are working together. They’re too closely related to be kept apart, while together the insights you gain from them can be much more powerful.
That said, it's clear SEO and PPC must each have their own unique strategies, but should still be coordinated with one another rather than treated as stand-alone digital marketing activities.
Search results are about perception. When your solution appears to be "all-encompassing", it gives your brand extra authority and authenticity. Ranking number one for an important industry search term provides some of that, but having your ad show as well gives potential customers confidence in your brand due to what appears to be an all-encompassing online presence.
This is a great way to start a relationship with visitors to your website and begin the customer journey. If you need some advice about how to get the most from your SEO and PPC campaigns, then why not call the digital marketing experts at Keyscouts to see if you qualify for a free consultation.
