“Which is better, SEO or paid search?” is a frequent question we hear from prospective clients. Based on their company’s needs, goals, and available resources, we can declare that one or the other is more important to them at this time. However, we know that they can get better results by combining SEO and PPC.
Both SEO and PPC services can drive traffic, conversions, and revenue on your site, but they do so in different ways:
They can also combine to compound each other’s results. For instance, if you can purchase and rank for relevant keywords, you get greater credibility on both “platforms”: more authority to improve SEO and higher click-through rates (CTRs) on paid search ads. Those higher CTRs in PPC improve your Quality Score on those keywords, which can help you save money on future bids.
However, paid search and organic search must be aligned to generate enhanced results together. They both need:
When you’re ready to implement a combined SEO and PPC strategy, here are seven ways to try them together that have proven successful.
A client’s website had many blog posts that ranked in the top 3 for their topics. By using these posts as sitelink extensions in their paid search ads, they further increased visibility and nearly doubled the average CTR of their ads.
A client in the financial services industry served as a broker for dozens of billers, some of whom were more profitable to the client than others. Rather than run ads for the insufficiently-profitable billers, they improved the meta descriptions of their site pages for these billers, giving them organic visibility to drive more customers without incurring more expenses via paid clicks.
Sometimes, things go wrong and a company is put through the wringer online. One client had many negative results come up from brand searches, which had a chilling effect on their paid search ads, reducing CTRs and conversions on the terms that should be their strongest. This was a job for SEO; by increasing their organic visibility and developing strong content that performed well, the company was able to push negative coverage farther down the search engine results page.
Effective content often starts with a keyword list to guide content development: which terms best align with marketing and business goals and should be targeted within on-page and meta content. Producing this list is part of SEO, but including insights from paid search keyword performance adds many dimensions to the list, including which terms have been the most effective in driving traffic and conversions. PPC keyword data takes a list from useful to profitable.
Introducing something new can be tough, whether you’re launching a new product or creating a whole new category. What you have to offer might address a need customers don’t even know they have yet, so running ads would be an exercise in futility and wasted time. Instead, use SEO to optimize your site’s technical, architectural, and mobile performance and to drive content development to gain organic visibility. When you’ve built an audience through SEO, then add PPC, using your SEO keyword data to guide PPC keyword selection.
If you’ve developed high-quality, high-value content that isn’t performing organically as well as you’d like it to, use the signal boost of PPC to promote that content. You don’t have to advertise the content itself in your ads; in fact, it’s better if you don’t. Instead, target the keywords relevant to the content, offer users
SEO tracking and PPC tracking don’t often look alike, using different tags, assigning value to different goals, and measuring different things. Even if these tracking and analytics products are all from the same company, they aren’t always compatible. But if you combine insights from SEO, PPC, and Analytics through a few hours of Analytics consulting, you can create a comprehensive, accurate single source of data for page and event tracking.
These are some of the ways you can combine SEO and paid search to get the most out of your digital marketing, but there are many more possibilities. If you’d like to see the ways PPC and SEO can work together for your company, let’s talk about how we can combine them for synergy, balance, and growth.