Having built up years of experience in Digital Marketing & now being a PPC Specialist at Clickthrough, I have witnessed some amazing results achieved when PPC merged with SEO.
When I’ve seen these two channels work together, both have seen the benefits for their campaigns, whether the goal is brand awareness, lead generation, or driving action & sales.
So, why should you consider merging these two channels? Read on, as I explain to you some of the key benefits of letting these two friendly rivals combine their efforts.
1. MAXIMIZE CLIENT SEARCH ENGINE RESULT RATING (SERP).
Even if PPC ads show at the top of the SERP rankings, ensuring you’re showing high for organic results will ensure your website is the only thing consumers see. For example, users who deliberately avoid ads may still see your brand at the top of the organic results, driving the same level of business.
Taking up as much space as possible in Search Engine Ranking Positions can benefit any website’s brand awareness, which leads me nicely to my next point.
2. ADD POWER TO YOUR BRAND AWARENESS.
Increasing brand awareness by occupying more SERP real estate can lead to increased users driving action or visiting a website directly – even long after their initial search. If potential customers don’t convert immediately, appearing in both ads and organic rankings can lead to stronger brand awareness, resulting in a stronger conversion rate overall, in the long run.
For example, if a user searches for the same service/product 10 times (something I do before buying!), and sees the same company over and over again, through both paid and organic results, this could potentially greatly influence their judgment.
3. IDENTIFY YOUR STRONGEST CROSS-CHANNEL KEYWORDS
If you have a successful PPC campaign, no doubt you will also have a list of your favorite keywords from this campaign. Have you decided that you can use this to crush your SEO for these keywords as well? Your best PPC keywords can also be your best SEO keywords.
By integrating the keywords that are performing well in your paid strategy into your organic strategy, increased visibility and traffic can make a significant difference (as we discussed above). Apart from that, PPC also lets you test new keywords which you can ultimately decide to optimize organically as the turnover is very fast – just set your keywords, write your ad, and boom! Your ad will serve and, as opposed to SEO, you won’t have to wait for crawlers to start ranking and seeing the performance.
4. BUILD A POWERFUL REMARKETING CAMPAIGN
If you maximize the use of both channels, it is understandable that you will receive more traffic. This will give you the freedom to build a much larger Audience list (and better understand your consumers). In the end, your Remarketing campaign will be more effective, and it will also be easier to build better brand loyalty + bring in more direct traffic or referrals.
5. IMPROVE YOUR STRATEGY BY ANALYZING YOUR DATA
The more data you have, the better decisions you can make and the more you can learn about your industry’s performance online and your consumer behavior, and perhaps what areas you can strengthen. By combining all the data sets, you can develop some useful charts that will illustrate the bigger picture of how you can improve your PPC & SEO campaigns together for the best long-term results.
6. BUILD A CAMPAIGN FOR HUMANS
While PPC and SEO have keywords at their core, strong SEO performance is increasingly dependent on great User Experience Design and improving the usability of the site to humans. Keeping these aspects of your site in perfect alignment with best practices for PPC, because by optimizing your landing pages you can generate high conversion rates for your paid search campaigns, along with reduced costs.
7. MORE EFFICIENT AND POWERFUL ADVERTISING MODELS.
While a well-maintained SEO strategy may prove to be more cost-effective in the long run, PPC campaigns really come on their own with the flexibility it offers for fast turnaround, ads that run right away, and the ability to drive visibility with an increased budget.
see two traffic sources become three, which further increases your users!
Ultimately, you want as many avenues as possible to ensure that your business has every chance of surviving online; so if this means adding Social Media traffic and Referrals to PPC, SEO & Direct traffic then it will be useful for any business in maximizing their visibility.