A Short Guide to Incorporating SEO Into Your PPC Marketing Campaign
PPC and SEO are both highly effective tools in your digital marketing toolkit, and when they work together complementing each other, nothing’s better than that.
Your Google ranking determines your website exposure. It has the power to make or break it.
Although organic ranking is not the only trendsetter today. Advertisements are gaining more prominent positions on the SERPs with the latest Google updates.
With this in mind, it has become more important now than ever to pay attention to both your SEO optimization as well as PPC marketing strategies to get a step ahead in the competition.
While one can achieve remarkable results from either one of them, why not level up your game and enjoy greater rewards with both of them working as a pair?
But how?
In this blog, we are going to discuss all you need to know to incorporate SEO into your PPC marketing campaign to take advantage of both of them.
SEO & Pay Per Click Marketing
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a marketing strategy that employs several tactics like keywords, backlinks, mobile optimization, content, and so on to boost the visibility of a website on SERPs. The goal of SEO is to drive organic traffic to the site.
The idea is to obey Google’s guidelines to rank higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). You can do this by optimizing your site’s loading speed, developing quality content, using quality backlinks, etc. You must also consider the user experience in this strategy.
On the other hand, just like SEO, PPC is a marketing strategy, although here, the aim is to drive traffic to your site.
The one and probably the most prominent difference between PPC and SEO is that you “pay” for the traffic in PPC. As the name suggests, Pay-Per-Click, you pay a fee every time a user clicks your ad. Although this also means that you don’t have to pay for the ad space, you don’t pay a single buck if no one clicks your ad.
Do they affect one another?
No, they don’t.
Your SEO strategy doesn’t affect your PPC marketing strategy and vice versa. Your PPC ads won’t affect your SEO, and likewise, your website rankings won’t affect your ads.
Moreover, since the goal is different, the approach is different. Usually, websites have two separate teams handling SEO and PPC.
So, the question arises once again. If they are so different from each other, how do they work together to benefit me?
Let’s find out how.
How SEO and PPC Can Work Together to Improve Your Website?
One of the best methods to use SEO and PPC together is via data sharing. You can utilize the data you gain from one strategy to enhance the other strategy.
Employing both the strategies together at once provides you with double the data, allowing you to have more parameters to analyze. Google offers its users a stockpile of data about their SEO strategies and PPC campaigns, such as conversion rates, CTRs, engagement metrics, and a lot more.
What you can do is see this information as one and then apply it to both your strategies to improve their performance simultaneously.
For example, from SEO strategy, you have impressions, organic CTRs, rankings, etc. and conversion data, CTRs, and CPC from PPC ad campaigns.
Analyzing this data as one gives you a better understanding of how you can change one or the other element to improve your overall performance.
There are plenty of instances where you can leverage this information, like:
- When you need to lower your budget
You can study both the data to find out the areas you need to cut. For example, see which keywords you are ranking for, which are consuming too much of your budget. You can stop running PPC ads for those keywords, and instead, you can start optimizing your website for those keywords to drive organic traffic. You can create valuable, informative, and engaging content using those keywords, which will help you rank higher in search results.
If you do this correctly, you will be able to recapture the traffic your PPC ads were driving earlier, using the SEO strategy. This way, you won’t need to pay for any clicks, which will save you a lot of money. Moreover, this traffic will be ‘long-term’ unlike that of paid campaigns.
Another method is to use long-tail keywords instead of generic ones as they cost more. You can use the data from your SEO results to find long-tail keywords. By placing bids on these keywords, you will be able to lower your marketing budget.
You can also put your SEO team to find out the places from where you are getting your most traffic from, and then your PPC team can adjust bids based on location. Geotargeting helps save a good amount of money too. This way, you will be targeting the right audience, generating better results, and spending less.
- Searching keywords
It is not really surprising for the SEO and PPC teams to miss out on some important keywords. However, by looking at more data, the teams will be able to point out keywords that they would have missed otherwise.
Information like what keywords or search terms did the users use to find your ad or land on your website, search phrases that are not being targeted but are generating SERP impressions, is available to both teams. With access to this kind of data, both teams can significantly improve their targeting efforts.
For example, suppose a user enters a search term that triggers your PPC ad. When they click on this ad, it will show up in your PPC ad performance data. You can then check whether the SEO team is using a particular keyword. If not, they can start targeting it right away.
Effects Of Merging SEO and PPC
By now, you must have understood the importance of data sharing, but that’s not all you can gain out of merging SEO and PPC. These are a few benefits that you can reap with this integration:
- Improved visibility
Using both SEO and PPC strategies makes your website rank on both organic as well as paid search. This gives you more exposure and authoritativeness as compared to your competitors, making you look like a more established entity in the industry.
How do you do this?
Keywords are the ultimate key. Using more and targeting better keywords helps you acquire a better ranking position in both organic and paid search results. Developing better content, targeted ads, and refined strategies will help you improve your website’s visibility.
- Better keyword testing
SEO results are not quick, so testing keywords can take a while. For instance, testing titles and metadata can take a long time to generate results.
However, in PPC, the results are immediate, and this can be used as an advantage when it comes to testing keywords.
You can use PPC to test the organic keywords first. This will let you know which keywords work and which does not. Based on these testings, you can then create your SEO strategy as now you know how you have to optimize your content and metadata for the keyword you want to rank for.
- Retargeting/Remarketing
With more data to analyze from PPC and SEO, retargeting becomes easier. You can use either one for remarketing to the audience who have already shown interest in you.
Not every user who lands on your website converts. Studies show that around 70-95% of the users won’t return to your website once they leave without completing the desired action. The average is a mere 3.75% for PPC ads across all industries.
This means a large fraction of your website visitors are not going to convert, which is absolutely alright. However, you shouldn’t let them go without giving it one more shot. This is where retargeting/remarketing comes into play. You can target the users who have expressed interest in your website earlier and remind them to complete their transaction this time.
For example, people who visited your website through organic search, you can remarket to them with a PPC ad. You can create a customized PPC ad regarding the product they had shown interest in earlier and give them a final push with an exciting offer or discount to encourage them to make a purchase.
- Matching the content
Creating ads that match your content becomes doable when you utilize both your SEO and PPC campaigns. This will ensure the maximum effectiveness of your efforts.
The PPC team might be able to craft an ad that brings in heavy traffic. But then what?
Most of the efforts become zero when the ad doesn’t match with the landing page content. That disconnect causes a lot of traffic to leave the website and not convert.
But by making the SEO and PPC teams work together as a pair, you can create better ads and landing pages. While the PPC team creates ads that drives more traffic, the SEO team will make landing pages that will motivate them to take the desired action.
Conclusion
Incorporating SEO into your PPC marketing strategy has numerous benefits like data sharing, increased visibility, better keywords testing, retargeting, and creating matching content. With proper plan and execution, and having both SEO and PPC teams work together, you can reap incredible benefits.