3 Reasons PPC and SEO Work Better Together

They also rely on the same medium and use some of the same tactical elements – keywords and search engines. So it makes sense to combine the two, regardless of whether your current PPC and SEO teams function separately. As the reasons that we outline below will showcase, by combining your PPC and SEO strategies, you can increase the success of both.

Test Before Commitment

SEO strategies take time and resources to succeed. With PPC, you can quickly launch, optimize or pull campaigns. You can also test ad copy across various keywords, which is why we’re recommending that you use your PPC campaigns for insight before you develop SEO strategies.

For example, let’s say that you’re marketing a shoe store and you sell a high heel shoe with clip-on bows. Through long tail keyword research, you discover the keyword “high heel shoe clip on” has very little competition. Rather than jumping right in and developing a series of 15 blog posts regarding clip-on bows, you can launch a PPC campaign to determine if it’s the right audience and they convert well.

Additionally, you can also test different messages to see what copy best increases click-throughs and conversions and then include this messaging throughout your digital content. PPC is a valuable tool to gather insight and test before committing to slower SEO strategies.

View the Funnel Holistically

Since your potential customers aren’t split in pieces, your strategy to get them to buy shouldn’t be either. If you think of your customer holistically and his or her behaviour as a journey through the ubiquitous sales and marketing funnel, traditionally, marketers believe SEO impacts customers at the start of their journey, when they’re doing research, and PPC impacts them at the end of their journey, pulling them towards a purchase.

Web analytics shows that people use both flavours of search throughout the journey. So PPC can also be used early in the funnel and can drive website visits when you do not have a presence for specific keywords or you haven’t got the resources to build a comprehensive SEO strategy. Conversely, you can look at those keywords that have a high conversion rate and develop SEO strategies around that or review your on-site search terms (from people who have visited your site) to suss out things they go looking for when they already know who you are.

Own the SERP

Unfortunately, your chances of driving people to your website via SEO or PPC are reduced substantially if you don’t appear on that first page of results. The more often you appear the better off you are, not only because you drive your competitors off that first page of results (or ideally down to the bottom), but also because you reinforce to your audience that you are the cat’s meow. The more links to you they see, the more credibility the audience gives to your company and product (wow, they must really be strong in this space, look at how many links Google has given them!).

Visibility leads to credibility and 40 percent of searchers don’t realize Google Ads are ads at all. Some people operate under the mistaken belief that if you appear organically, you do not need to spend ad dollars on PPC, but Google found that 89% of traffic generated via PPC ads was not replaced when the PPC ads were paused, so PPC ads increased traffic and didn’t take away clicks that you would have gotten organically. If you combine your strategies for PPC and SEO to own those SERP for the best keywords, you’ll increase your success.

Want more great articles on SEO and PPC? This is what we do for a living. We have plenty.