Are you seeking a quick solution to increase website traffic or a comprehensive approach to enhance your brand's long-term visibility? Combining SEO and PPC strategies provides the ideal means to empower your company for maximizing its reach and popularity.
The Dichotomy of Singular Motivation
While SEO and PPC may appear as distinct strategies, their methodologies differ significantly in pursuing the same goal. However, they operate in tandem, and their synergy can greatly amplify a company's digital marketing presence.
Before delving into how this partnership optimizes profitable engagement for your company, it's essential to deconstruct and grasp each strategy independently. We should also explore the limitations of solely pursuing one of them and the advantages of combining the two.
What is SEO?
SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, represents a natural approach to boost website traffic. It involves on-page optimization and strategically incorporating keywords associated with a company's services, based on thorough research. Its primary objective is to enhance visibility and establish site authority, ensuring the company's presence when specific keywords are searched. This strategy aims to lay a robust foundation for the brand on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), with the ultimate goal of fostering a long-term customer base. Once a successful SEO campaign secures a company's ranking, it's typically a reliable and enduring position, unless there's a significant shift in SEO trends.
What are the potential drawbacks of exclusively prioritizing SEO as a strategy?
Using SEO as a strategy takes a lot of time and can take months to make your website successful. Also, because it's quite technical and depends on how search engines work, your website's ranking might not stay steady at first. This means your competitors, who have been using SEO for a while or are focusing on PPC ads, could be outranking you.
What is PPC?
Alternatively, ( Pay-Per-Click ) PPC advertising is a method that specifically curates the traffic through carefully created targeted adverts in search engines, social platforms, and other popular online destinations. This is a strategy that delivers quick results and can instantly maximize the hits on your website, shooting up the site's rank on SERP. The consumer base generated through PPC ads keep up appearances until the company keeps paying for them.
Drawbacks of strategizing site popularity only using PPC
PPC is always associated with the law of diminishing returns, it is rather cost heavy, one needs to keep in mind that when a marketer places an ad on a platform and pays the host every time its clicked on, the cost per click is often high than the marginal traffic it ends up generating for the company.
With the competitiveness of the ad market, there is a need for marketers to continuously keep adding to their budgets for ad campaigning and if they cannot do it the entire cycle becomes very counterproductive. Not to mention that PPC campaigns keep evolving too, just like SEO, leaving the companies bereft of firm footing when used in isolation as a digital marketing strategy.
Benefits of Combining PPC & SEO
Enhanced Reach
While SEO helps attract organic traffic to a website from audiences a local or targeted service audience, PPC enhances engagement by bringing in customers that are unaware of your brand but are searching for keywords that are descriptive of the services you have to offer. When used together, they broaden your potential customer base.
A Quick Fix that Yields Long-Term Results
PPC can drive website traffic almost instantly, complementing the long-term brand awareness cultivated by SEO efforts.
Cost efficiency
Using both SEO and PPC proves to be a cost-efficient marketing approach, surpassing the reliance on just one. PPC complements organic SEO traffic. Even if your SEO ranking drops for specific keywords, PPC ads can maintain visibility. Conversely, if SEO boosts rankings organically, you can halt PPC campaigns, saving on expenses over time.
Opportunity for Refined Customer Engagement
The synergy between SEO and PPC allows for experimentation and adaptation in various ways to discover the most effective strategies for a specific brand's target audience.
Instances of SEO and PPC integrating to Work Together
Keyword Coverage and Data-Informed Conversion Rate Optimization
To begin, when running both organic and PPC campaigns concurrently, there is twice the data available for analysis. This simplifies the process of examining aspects such as identifying keywords with the most favorable conversion rates. This data can then be leveraged to enhance a company's overall website strategy.
Additionally, another valuable approach involves utilizing site search data to inform the selection of PPC keywords, ensuring the highest possible traffic. For instance, PPC can target keywords when the ranking of organic keywords experiences a decline. This is because PPC ads take precedence in search engine results, while organic results contribute to longer-term brand awareness.
Reinforcing SERP Opportunities and Visibility
Utilizing both SEO and PPC grants a company greater authority over its SERP (Search Engine Results Page) presence, which denotes the portion of the search results page occupied by the company's website. By employing a cohesive marketing strategy that combines PPC ad campaigns and SEO's organic traffic, a company can ensure a consistent presence on SERPs. This approach enhances the likelihood of directing traffic to the company's website, with each strategy safeguarding the website's ranking when the other experiences fluctuations, ultimately establishing a dependable SERP dominance.
While we have endeavored to distinguish the collaborative aspects of this duo, these operations and integrations often interconnect and yield benefits when employed in synergy. Interested in understanding how their partnership optimizes site recognition? Explore further insights here.
What keywords to be Mindful of While Collaborating on SEO and PPC?
Both these strategies, as we already know, are extensively reliant on keywords to attract audiences with certain specific words and phrases. The key idea while figuring this out for an organization or brand should be the consumer demand but one could also categorize focal words or phrases based on these distinctions:
- Transaction-based – these include phrases providing trials, price pages, or purchase words.
- Solution-based – phrases or keywords that include words including top, best, reviews, case studies, etc.
- Education-based – such keywords or phrases would pertain to providing guides, glossaries, definitions, what is, or resources, etc.
- Competitor-based – these include keywords or phrases that include names of competing companies, products, or service lines.
How to Coordinate the Distribution of Keywords in this Duo?
PPC should avoid paying for educational-intent words and should lean towards transactional and solutions-oriented keywords as they are more informational and likely to bring about more traffic with specific intent.
SEO, simultaneously, should consider educational-focused keywords in order to raise overall brand awareness.
The Duo of SEO and Pay-Per-Click for the Win!
As a business owner, you always want more people to visit your website and beat your competition. One effective way to do this is by using both SEO and pay-per-click advertising strategies together. This increases your chances of showing up in search engine results.
Using these two methods also helps you understand your customers better and what they want. This knowledge can help you use your resources wisely for better results.
If you're not already using both SEO and PPC in your digital marketing strategy, now is a good time to start. It's cost-effective and can give you a better understanding of how well your brand is doing in the market. It also improves your visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) and gives you more control over how popular your company becomes.
If handling both of these marketing methods feels overwhelming, you can consider getting help from a digital marketing agency like Continuum Digital. Our team of digital marketing experts can create a strategy that's just right for your business. Contact us today!