How Should PPC and SEO Work Together to Gain Visibility?
A successful website is like a well-oiled race car; it requires various moving parts working together in unison to function smoothly and achieve desired results. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements and search engine optimization (SEO) are two crucial elements.
Both PPC and SEO are hugely influential to a company’s online success, so learning to navigate their ins and outs is an important step for any emerging or growing business. Buckle up, sit back, and get ready to learn all about the basics of PPC and SEO techniques and how they can work together to increase your site’s visibility!
Navigating the Basics of Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEO and PPC both fall under the umbrella of Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
Search engine optimization is essentially the process of using keywords and other website elements to increase your webpage’s ranking in search engine results, directly influencing the amount of traffic directed toward your webpage.
Pay-per-click advertising is a form of online advertising that showcases your strategically designed ads in front of thoughtfully selected audiences, working to drive traffic toward your website. As the name implies, you’re only charged when prospective customers click on your ads.
Here at WEB ROI, we offer SEO services and PPC management, as well as various free informative resources for your benefit, including:
- How to Write Killer SEO Content
- SEO Facts and Myths
- SEO as the Foundation of Your Marketing Strategy
- PPC Landing Page Tips
What’s the Difference Between SEO and PPC?
Both SEO and PPC are essential elements of a successful digital marketing strategy. You can think of PPC advertising as filling your tank with gas; it provides you with an immediate boost, propelling your business forward and fueling your journey on the path to success. SEO optimization can be thought of as an oil change. Just as necessary, though less immediate. Maintaining your website’s SEO is crucial to keeping it running successfully; however, the effects are more long-term than PPC advertising.
PPC and SEO both increase your website’s visibility, but in different ways. PPC yields more immediate results, whereas SEO is more of a long-term strategy. When combined, PPC advertising and SEO strategy can work in tandem to drive web traffic toward your site, accelerating your business and placing you on the path to success.
Are you looking to improve your SEO and PPC efforts to increase your site’s visibility? At WEB ROI, that’s what we do! Contact our team today.
SEM Tips for Better SEO and PPC Results
Here are some tips to help you combine your SEO and PPC strategies to drive your business forward and leave the competition in the dust:
1. Maintain PPC Even When Your SEO Is Working
Business owners often feel tempted to ease up on their PPC advertising when they rank high on search results for main keywords. The thought process is that if you’re ranking well organically, there’s no need to continue paying for more visibility – but this is an oversimplification.
Even if your webpage ranks as the first organic result, it’s likely only showing up after a handful of ads. This means that your organic result will only show up halfway down the page and likely past the fold on mobile devices.
Not only will maintaining PPC ads help to increase visibility but showing results in both paid and organic results can do wonders for your image, working to show customers that you’re an established and professional business that is organized and dedicated to their work.
2. Share Data
When you have both PPC and SEO campaigns running simultaneously, that gives you more data to work with when making decisions. Analyze your data to determine which organic and PPC keywords yield the highest conversion rate, and you can use that information to optimize your marketing strategies further.
More specifically, PPC data can be very beneficial in creating SEO content. What works for PPC can often work for SEO, so determining what’s working within your PPC ad campaigns can act as a guide to follow for your SEO strategy. You gain an idea of how to create title tags, meta descriptions, and page content for the pages that you wish to rank organically. Thanks to PPC’s immediate results, you can analyze the data to quickly see what works and what doesn’t, giving yourself a roadmap to a successful SEO strategy.
This is especially true in social media marketing. Social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn allow you to showcase paid ads to highly specific groups of people, giving you data for very precise subgroups of your target audience. This data provides you with a more in-depth understanding of your consumers, helping you refine your SEO strategy further.
3. Control Your Public Perception
From time to time, businesses encounter PR problems, and they need damage control. Combined PPC and SEO efforts work together well to help business owners to steer the conversation and get ahead of the public so that damage is minimized to a mere speedbump rather than driving your company off the road entirely.
It comes down to visibility. Consider the Gulf oil spill by a BP-operated vessel. Despite being one of the largest environmental disasters in American history, BP used PPC advertising to steer the public conversation and perception. They paid for PPC ads linked to the keyword “oil spill” so that the first result linked to a BP landing page focused on the company’s cleanup effort. By utilizing strategic PPC ads, they were able to tell their side of the story, divert some attention away from their mistakes, and minimize the potential damage to their online presence and the company as a whole.
While it’s unlikely that your business will experience a PR disaster of that scale, it’s still helpful to understand the connection between PPC and SEO strategies in this sort of context. You can focus your efforts on either PPC or SEO marketing based on your particular position at any given time, giving your business more power in steering the conversation and establishing an intentional brand reputation that produces the desired results.
Work with an SEM Expert to Get More out of Combined PPC and SEO Efforts
The team at WEB ROI are digital marketing experts with extensive experience creating successful PPC and SEO strategies across various industries. Contact WEB ROI today to discuss your particular PPC and SEO needs and discover how thoughtful marketing can propel your business forward on the road to success!
Check out our Ebooks on SEO and PPC ads here:
