SEO & PPC are too often viewed as mutually exclusive by many business owners looking to initiate digital marketing activities. We’re here to tell you they are the best of friends, and for a number of reasons too.
We as online marketers like to see them as two channels that support one overarching channel; this being search marketing. It’s important for us to get this across to you, as they can yield some great results for your business when working harmoniously.
Benefits of Running SEO & PPC Campaigns Together
Online Visibility
Combining SEO & PPC makes your company really stand out in search engines and can have a significant impact on the performance of your overall digital marketing strategy. By simply owning more of the online ‘real estate’ so to speak, there’s a much higher chance of people clicking through to your website when searching selected phrases. You are also indirectly instilling trust in your customer as the legitimacy of your business increases by way of repetition. If you’re showing up 3 times in someones search results, it often signifies importance meaning they are more inclined to click through.
A study by Google shows that only ranking organically (SEO) on the first page can see a significant drop in traffic if previously used alongside PPC. That’s a lot of online market share that is suddenly lost. If your business’ overall marketing strategy depends on gaining a certain amount of market share to sustain growth, both offline and online, then it’s important to remain competitive and make your presence felt. In the online space, combining SEO & PPC is good way to make this happen.
Remaining Agile
Seasonal trends will affect a lot of businesses, and being agile enough is vital to capitalise on them. Because SEO is a long-term online strategy, it is hard to get immediate results without the help of paid search. While your organic rankings are growing over time for the main keywords of your product or service, PPC allows you to capitalise on seasonal trends by creating highly targeted campaigns with specific messaging, i.e Christmas, Fathers Day, etc, delivered when and where it matters most.
Uncovering New Search Trends
When committing to an SEO or PPC campaign, conducting keyword research is an essential step in uncovering what terms people use when searching for your product or service. However, it’s also easy to miss some opportunities too (we didn’t just admit that). Running a PPC campaign is a great way to uncover any of these missed opportunities and also identify any emerging search trends. By running PPC campaigns alongside SEO, you are accumulating search query data that may have been missed in the initial research phase.
Test Your Ad Copy
The way you communicate your message to your audience is such an important aspect to marketing in general. However, it’s not always easy to get it right, and usually takes a bit of time to refine your communication in a way that truly appeals to your target customer. Again, this is where PPC offers greater flexibility. While your website changes have been made around the core keywords that define your product or service in your SEO campaign, PPC allows you to constantly test and review your messaging through split A/B testing. Split A/B testing text ads allows constant refining and updating based off hard data that has been accumulated. By knowing what data to look for gives you an understanding of how appealing your ads are, how well they engage potential new customers, and how well they convert. Copy is so important on a website and advertisement, so making sure you have the right copy that talks to your customer in a way that resonates will help attract more qualified leads.