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Over the years, much of the language surrounding SEO and PPC has focused on how they compete against one another. You’ll see both guides about why PPC is a better use of marketing spend and also articles on why SEO is best. In reality, there’s nothing wrong with creating a strategy that highlights the positives of both.
Why choose between paid and organic search when you can combine the two? When you break it down, the goal of organic search is to attract as many people as possible to your website. Well, isn’t the goal of paid search exactly the same?
Even if you’re working with a small marketing budget, you can still benefit from both PPC and SEO. In this guide, we’re going to assume you understand the basics of PPC and SEO; we don’t need to explain how each works. Here, we’re going to focus on how to combine the two. After reading our tips, you should feel confident enough to adopt this strategy yourself.
If you’re running an organic search campaign, you should be comfortable with the keywords on your website. With Google leading the charge, tools like Keyword Planner and Analytics help us find the keywords people use to discover services like ours. This gives us the basis for marketing material and content.
When combining paid and organic search, you don’t need to do separate research. Use what you’ve learned from organic search campaigns and implement this into paid search campaigns (and vice versa). When you start a paid campaign for a specific keyword, complement this with blog posts and articles with the same keyword. If done successfully, you’ll soon rank both with the paid ads and organic content.
While on the subject of keywords, remember that negative keywords can impact your campaigns as much as positive keywords. With long-tail keywords, you can identify the negative keywords not performing on a PPC campaign. The more you learn, the less time you’ll spend paying for unnecessary clicks.
If you currently invest in PPC advertising, you’ll know the pain that comes with trying to find the best ad text and creatives. When you combine PPC and SEO, your hard work is worthwhile; you can use the ad text that performs well and integrate it into your site content. As well as using the best PPC texts as the foundation for articles, we’ve also seen marketers use them in meta description tags.
PPC data tells a story, which provides an opportunity for its usage in SEO-friendly content. Look at which of your ads have the highest CTR and review the most popular topics. From here, you can transform these topics into full articles and guides. If they generate interest in ad form, they will encourage organic traffic in content form too.
Your website is ranking, and the strategy seems to be working. Now is the time to celebrate, right? Not exactly. This tends to be where marketers go wrong. Just because you’ve gained some traffic doesn’t mean that everything has worked and you can stop optimizing. You need to maintain traffic and encourage conversions. You need to gain repeat customers who keep coming back. For those who abandon their cart, your job is to get them to complete their order. By combining paid and organic search, you can launch a remarketing campaign with the aim of achieving brand engagement and repeat customers.
When a potential customer abandons their cart, figure out which items they were looking at. It could be a great opportunity to create a timely, personalized remarketing email campaign. We recommend you discover which items people view more than others. With a short list to hand, write articles based around these products. It could be a short guide on how to use or make the most of the product, or another item customers might like alongside it. While those who have already purchased get a handy guide, anybody who abandoned the cart will get a small reminder to complete their order.
When it comes to getting clicks on paid ads on Google and other search engines, there is something you can do to boost results quickly, and it’s something not many marketers consider: improve organic results. When searches reveal an organic link on the same page as a paid link, it increases credibility and thus the likelihood of getting more clicks onto your website. If you can’t rank in the top ten search results, your success will be more limited.
Whenever a paid link and organic link show together, consumers get the impression that your brand is authoritative and informative. This tactic is a good idea when running a promotion because it increases exposure. However, when used too frequently, it comes across as pushy, which will have the opposite effect.
Although we do everything in our power to make all SEO and PPC combinations work, the truth is that some won’t be successful. Back in 2010, BP launched a paid ad campaign that took people to a landing page which detailed cleanup efforts after their infamous oil spill. When anyone typed ‘oil spill’ into Google, this ad would show. By putting its own link at the top, it was in control of what people saw. Instead of seeing news articles and opinion pieces, many consumers were led to the BP page instead.
What can we learn from this? Sometimes, it’s a good idea to boost brand awareness and reputation through a PPC campaign. At other times, we need to consider the social and moral backlash that may come from potential campaigns. With this in mind, we need to take appropriate actions at all times.
For a long time, marketers and business leaders have scratched their heads trying to guess the content that an audience needs and wants. For us, the answer is simple: ask them. Why guess and potentially waste time and money when you can ask them directly? Set up a poll on social media, ask questions through email marketing, or send a survey to customers who spend money with your business.
Thanks to your new combined PPC and SEO strategy, the results of this research will not only provide ideas for content, but also fuel a paid advertising campaign. Essentially, you’re learning the terms and phrases people search for that relate to your products and services.
You may think we’re talking about PPC ads here, but targeting actually applies to both (and hopefully you can see why the two work together so well now). On platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, you’re probably targeting specific types or groups of people. You might narrow ad targeting down to location, gender, age range, job type and more. As previously mentioned, we can use this information from PPC campaigns to improve SEO and specifically focus on targeting.
One of the most salient ways to measure success is by paying attention to how well you’re targeting. Nobody will act on the best ad in the world if you aren’t putting it in the right place. Nobody will read the best article in the world if you’re putting it on LinkedIn and your audience doesn’t frequent this platform.
Regardless of the scope of your marketing efforts, we highly recommend combining paid and organic search in your strategy. The shared information will provide a variety of insights. Don’t forget to continually improve targeting using the information from PPC and SEO campaigns, ask your audience for assistance, encourage clicks, focus on return customers and pay attention to keywords.
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