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SEO and PPC are two marketing strategies that couldn’t be more different to one another.
However, just because they’re on opposite sides of the spectrum doesn’t mean you can’t use both strategies together.
In this article, we’re going to show you 4 ways in which focusing on SEO helps your paid advertising performance and 8 reasons why you should use them together!
But first, let’s quickly define both terms.
Put simply, SEO (search engine optimisation) is the process of optimising your website so that it can be discovered on search engines by your target audience.
By rising up the search engine rankings, you can advertise your service or product to millions of people around the globe without doing any cold outreach or paying for advertisements.
Now that the majority of website traffic stems from the likes of Google and Bing, SEO is becoming more important than ever.
SEO is generally comprised of three pillars:
PPC (pay-per-click) is a different form of digital marketing where you agree for a platform to advertise your website and pay them for every click you receive on your site.
For example, if you pay £5 per click on your advert and for every 10 clicks you’re able to sell a £500 product then you’ve made an incredible profit on your advertising.
PPC ads can come in a variety of shapes and sizes. You have ads that consist of: text, or an image, or a video, or a combination of the three.
Furthermore, you can advertise on a range of platforms. You can advertise on everything from Google to Youtube to Tiktok!
How much you pay for each click will depend on the amount you can bid on each placement, the quality of your advertisement, and your total budget.
Before we get into how you can use both platforms to work together, we wanted to touch upon how a basic understanding of SEO can significantly help your Paid Advertising campaign.
Here are 3 reasons why you should develop a basic understanding of SEO for your paid ads campaign!
First and foremost, to ensure that you’re getting a return on your paid ads campaign, you need to ensure that your ads are getting in front of your target audience.
Chances are that your advertisements are made to specifically convert your target audience. They’re probably not going to be very effective if they’re shown to random members of the population.
Now to ensure that your ads get in front of your target audience, you need to understand what your target audience are searching for and where they’re hanging out.
But that’s not all, you also need to look at the volume of searches and the competition for those keywords. If you’re competing with the likes of Nike for a keyword, chances are they’re going to outbid you!
You can learn how to do this through SEO. It may sound simple but there’s a process to identifying keywords that are high in volume and are low in competitive difficulty – just ask any SEO consultant.
The next reason as for why you should learn basic SEO before carrying out a paid ads campaign is because it can amplify your brand strength.
And one of the most influential factors in a paid ads campaign is your brand strength. Meaning if someone recognizes your brand and trusts your brand, they’re much more inclined to click on your paid advertisement.
Without a doubt, organic listings on search engine results are much more trustworthy than a paid ads listing. The majority of people always click on organic listings over paid advertisements, i’m willing to bet you do the same!
This is because the general public vote on these search engine results with their attention; therefore, the websites at the top of the search engine rankings have earned their place there through providing value to that demographic.
It’s the main reason why we tend to gravitate to the websites at the top of the rankings. Therefore, if you can simultaneously build upon your SEO, you’ll recognise that your paid ads campaigns will be more successful as more people correlate your brand with value.
Last but not least, one of the reasons why we see so many unsuccessful paid ad campaigns is because of the website experience.
Even if you do a great job of encouraging someone to click on your paid ads, if your website struggles to load or your navigation is confusing you’ll struggle to convert your visitors.
This means that you could very well end up throwing all of the money that you invested into your paid ads campaign away.
By learning basic SEO, you’ll understand that one of the core focuses for any website is your technical SEO.
You’ll quickly start learning about how to improve your site speed so visitors don’t leave, how to organise your site so that you rise up the search engine rankings, and how to ensure that your pages are being crawled by Google’s bots.
And that’s not all. When mixed with On-Page SEO, you’ll learn about how to optimise your site so that people stay on each page for as long as possible whilst also improving your conversion rates.
Paid ads work incredibly well to draw in traffic but only through focusing on your SEO will you provide a user experience good enough to keep them coming back.
Now that we’ve covered why basic SEO is a requisite for a successful paid ads campaign, let’s get into a bit more detail as for why you should be focusing on growing your SEO in the long term whilst also carrying out a paid ads campaign.
The very first reason as for why you should employ an SEO strategy with a PPC strategy is for coverage among the search engine results page.
This will come as a shock to absolutely nobody but the more online real estate that you can take up, the more likely people are to visit your website.
If you can show up as a paid advertisment and as the number 1 organic listing, you’re almost guaranteeing that someone clicks on your site. Especially for the majority of people who use their mobile devices which can only fit a maximum of three search results on their screen.
Furthermore, that sort of coverage works to etch your brand’s name into your target audience’s mind. This makes them much more likely to visit your website in the future upon recognising the name and even engage in revenue driving activities.
Tying into the first point made, with the extra coverage among the search engine results comes more volume of leads.
Whilst there are still plenty of people who engage with paid ads, the majority of internet users rarely (if ever) engage with them.
By just offering the organic listing to them, you’re able to attract a significantly larger proportion of your target audience.
Furthermore, if you’re able to scale both SEO and Paid ads proportionately, you’ll walk away with more than double the leads – not only because you’re moving from one strategy to two but because they both work well to improve upon each other.
If you lean towards the SEO – long term, higher reward play, you’re going to love this secret keyword research strategy.
Instead of carrying out keyword research, writing content, and waiting months to see if it paid off, you can significantly fast-track the process by taking advantage of paid ads.
By using a PPC campaign, you can get your advertisment in front of thousands of people within seconds. You can use this opportunity to split test your keywords to identify which ones resonate best with your target audience.
If you listing with keyword A attracts dozens more people than keyword B, you’ll know which one to create content and landing pages around.
It may take a few days of A/B testing but it’s much quicker than having to wait months if not years to recognise if your keyword strategy works with SEO.
As we mentioned previously. A basic level of SEO can significantly improve your paid ads campaign just from ensuring that your site load time is around the average mark and that your site is indexed properly by Google.
However, if you can continue to improve upon your technical SEO, you’ll continue to see incremental gains in your ppc performance.
Every small improvement you make to your technical SEO, the better user experience you’re going to be able to provide. And if there’s one thing that’s going to move the needle for your paid ads conversion, it’s the user experience you’re able to provide.
Furthermore, by ensuring that your site doesn’t contain any broken links (whether that be internal or outbound, less people are likely to leave your site once clicking on your paid advertisement.
The ability to re-market is perhaps the biggest benefit with utilising SEO and a PPC campaign together.
SEO is incredibly effective at drawing people into your site, you can create valuable content that helps your target audience and showcase it on your site. An example would be this very article that you’re reading on our website.
But what if you don’t convert them once they visit your site – the reality is that the majority of website visitors are not going to make a purchase or inquiry.
Another truth is that it can be incredibly hard to get your brand back in front of those same people immediately using SEO. If someone comes to your store for sneaker advice and then leaves, you’re only going to get in front of them once the idea of sneaker care comes into their head again.
This is where a PPC campaign can really shine. Using a PPC campaign, you can pay for your brand to sit in front of people that have recently visited your website.
This little reminder can be great for building brand recognition in the long term and encouraging your target audience to come back to your site and make a conversion!
Whilst we definitely do believe that for everyone looking to build a brand that lasts for decades, you need to be focusing on SEO.
The reality is that a sole focus on SEO just is not realistic for many small business owners.
SEO can take months if not years to really start gaining traction and many of us need money through the door sooner rather than later!
This is where a PPC campaign can be incredibly beneficial. By using paid ads, you can ensure that you’re generating leads today. You don’t have to learn SEO best practices or wait for Google to rank your site; instead, you can turn those ads on and start making sales today.
It almost sounds too good to be true, right?
The only downfall is that paid ads often turn out to be much more expensive in the long term compared to SEO – hence why we recommend that you incorporate them alongside each other.
When it comes to digital marketing, you never want to be reliant on one platform, it’s always best practice to spread your lead generation throughout different platforms.
We’ve worked with businesses who have solely relied upon their Google Ads account to scale their business only to find out one day that they’ve been restricted. As you can imagine, this literally crippled their business over night.
Similarly, on the SEO side there are ALWAYS changes in Google’s algorithms – it’s exhausting! You may go from receiving 100,000 monthly visitors to 20,000 over night because Google have decided to start pushing a certain type of content.
Therefore, by using both SEO and PPC together you’re ensuring that your business is protected from any surprise events.
One area in which PPC really shines is in it’s ability to offer short feedback cycles. You can test so many different variables that are not related to your paid ads campaigns at all through PPC campaigns.
Results in digital marketing typically take a really long time:
The beauty of paid ads is you can pay a small fee to get whatever text, image, URL in ront of thousands of people within a matter of hours. The’re never been a better vehicle for split testing.
Hopefully this article has been helpful with regards to using both SEO and PPC simultaneously. Not only can you diversify your digital marketing efforts but using both strategies makes each one more effective.
If you’re looking to read more about using SEO and PPC together, the guys over at The Marketing Practice have a great article on the topic. Click here to check it out!
If you’re looking to read more about SEO, click here for another one of our blog posts!
