SEO and PPC – they’re both great ways to drive traffic and generate quality leads for your business. They also happen to work together very well – when done correctly.
Conventional wisdom tells us that SEO and PPC campaigns should be kept separate because their goals are different: SEO is meant to attract free, organic traffic while PPC is meant to generate leads and sales. And for a long time, that’s how businesses would run their campaigns with the two never crossing over into each other.
However, as Paid Social has grown in popularity and more recently as tools have been developed making it easier than ever to manage multiple campaigns at once (without having to resort to spreadsheets), the two are starting to work together more and more often. It’s actually becoming quite common for businesses to run both PPC and SEO campaigns at the same time – at least, in some capacity.
If you are a local business you should also consider using Google My Business listings to make your business show up in local search results.
Even if you are a larger business or don’t have the time to manage both PPC and SEO, you should then consider working with an internet marketing agency such as Profit Labs who can put together a winning marketing strategy for your company.
How does SEO and PPC work together?
Paid Search & Organic Search are Not Mutually Exclusive
For starters, organic rankings and PPC ads do not have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, the two can complement one another quite nicely. This is especially true if you’re just starting out or don’t have a huge budget for marketing.
SEO helps boost your website’s authority in Google’s eyes. This means that ranking higher organically will help you generate more clicks through the PPC ads on your page.
Also, assuming you have set up proper tracking, your PPC campaign data can give you some valuable insight into what you should be improving on for SEO purposes. For example, if you see that something like having product videos is resulting in a decreased number of visitors clicking through from your ad to your site, you’ll know that adding more videos is something you need to work on.
Also, consider the fact that most PPC networks allow for keyword-level bidding (where it’s possible to set bids for individual keywords). If you’re not using this option (and if you’re not, you should definitely ask your network provider for it), then you’re missing out on a great opportunity.
In other words, if someone is searching for information about your industry or business type and the keywords they use are the same as those found in your PPC ads, you can direct them to either organic results or ad copy. For example, if someone is searching for [seo company], you could show them an ad that says “Find out why we’re one of the best seo companies in NYC” and then direct them to your website’s homepage (or a specific landing page).
While many inbound marketers will tell you they hate PPC campaigns because they usually involve buying traffic, there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t be using both SEO and PPC campaigns together.
Conclusion
If done correctly, Paid Search & Organic Search can work very well together to boost your conversions. What are your thoughts on the two working together? Do you use both or just one? Leave us a comment below!
