With 42% of web traffic coming from search, if you aren’t paying serious attention to SEO and PPC you’re missing a significant chunk of your target market.
It is all too common for SEO and PPC to be seen as rivals, even as opposing forces in the overall marketing universe. While each has distinct advantages and difficulties, they really come into their own when you bring them together. Generating leads for your business through both paid and organic means really is the best tactic of them all.
We’ll briefly go over the strengths of each method, then show you how they overlap to deliver website visitors in a way that is uniquely effective.
I want quick results from my Search Engine Marketing
If you want rapid results, PPC, also known as paid search, has obvious appeal. Just put some ads together with the right keywords, then make sure your clickers are getting sent to your best and most engaging content.
The downside to PPC is the cost involved of the actual channel but also the cost of a PPC agency to manage the campaigns for you. Depending on your industry, there will be a handful of keywords which everyone will be fighting over, driving the cost-per-click higher and higher. Research by Wordstream has discovered that the most expensive keyword in 2018 was the word “casino” with a price tag of £58.57 per click! You must be blindingly confident in the conversion power of your website to be comfortable paying that much for a single visitor. While it’s unlikely your target keywords will hit quite that height, PPC is not a “no-cost growth hack”.
What about Organic Marketing? Do I need that?
Organic Marketing, or Search Engine Optimisation, is in some ways the opposite of PPC. In contrast to PPC, the upfront costs of SEO are low, but it will take time to build up your presence and start generating a return.
The challenge of SEO is balancing the number of keywords in your content. Too many and your blogs will be nothing but platitudes, too few and you won’t be high enough in the search results for anyone to stumble across you. On the plus side, incorporating SEO keywords into content that you are already producing should only require a few tweaks to your writing style. Once you are into the swing of it, it will become second nature, rather than being a separate task to be added to your already extensive to-do list.
How to implement effective strategies for both organic and paid marketing
Once your SEO and PPC are running at full tilt, they complement each other in a number of ways. The simplest of these is that you will appear twice on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This creates the impression that you are an authority on the topic in question, as well as making you more visible.
Rather than separate silos, both strategies should inform one another, feeding data back and forth. If a particular PPC advert is generating a large number of clicks, then you can use the copy to inform your content. This will improve your SEO score, without the financial outlay of more PPC ads. In turn, analysing your SEO results may well throw up a powerful keyword that you haven’t thought of. If you haven’t considered it, your competitors probably haven’t either, so the keyword may well be cheap on PPC.
On the cost of PPC keywords, if a specific keyword is too expensive to justify the spend, build it into your content for SEO purposes instead. Keyword cost is based entirely on popularity as a search term, so high-cost PPC terms are a shortcut to what buyers are searching for. In addition, many search engine users will gravitate towards the organic results rather than the ads, as they understand that the adverts are being paid for, and so may come from the company with the most cash rather than the greatest expertise.
Ready to get started?
Hopefully, this blog has inspired you to get clever with your SEO and PPC strategies, and you’ll soon have more website visitors than you know what to do with! If you need a little more help, our Search Engine Marketing consultants are standing ready to help you.