How to effectively combine SEO and PPC

The most common way to optimize your website’s web marketing strategy is either by utilizing SEO or PPC (for this article when it comes to PPC we will refer to Google Adwords and vice versa). The paradigm that the majority of web marketers have been using is an alternate model of using either SEO or PPC when the campaign goals aren’t achieved.

This way of thinking though, is not bringing the desired results and therefore should be a paradigm shift on how these two strategies are utilized for maximum effectiveness.

Optimizing search engine dynamics is a goal that the majority of companies aim for and a powerful as well as effective way to achieve this is to combine SEO and PPC.

Utilizing a comprehensively planned SEO strategy, will bring in long term results and top rankings in search engines as well as a responsive feedback with your customer base. On the other hand, PPC offers immediate results directing website traffic to the displayed ads and banners maximizing cost effectiveness and encouraging direct contact with your customers.

In order to effectively combine both strategies though, you need to combine a thoughtful and a systematic process.

• The first most important step is to set up your PPC, which will send visitors to the most relevant landing page. PPC campaigns are mostly effective when they contain ad groups attached to relevant keywords that will direct visitors to the target page. If PPC is not set up in this manner in your campaign and you are sending all your visitors to the homepage, you can still get insights through PPC reports but it will however be less insightful.
• The second important step is to have your Adwords account linked with Google Analytics and that way you can export the campaign statistics as they pertain to traffic and its sources which will give you a good idea about customer behavior, conversions and sales.

HOW TO COMBINE SEO AND PPC

1. Creation of landing pages

When sound content pages are aimed correctly they are valuable both in SEO and PPC quality scores.
PPC assists you in assessing a variety of things such as:
• Google’s judgment of your pages
• Pages with higher quality scores
• Keywords on those high quality pages
• Customer’s assessment of your pages, bounce rates, exit rates, time on page.

2. Keyword Selection

Google Analytics has recently changed its keyword analysis (“not provided” organic traffic) which has resulted in Adwords becoming the most effective tool to assessing

keyword effectiveness. One way to utilize this aspect is to start with Adwords keyword analysis and to export the results of the targeted keywords into your SEO strategy and statistics.

The alignment of paid and organic efforts should be your basic consideration along with the keywords and their associated competition and costs. A word of caution though, due to financial constrains or depending on your ROI goals you may not always be able to buy paid search ads. Also, the amount of competition for any given keyword makes the effort to rank organically that much more difficult and resource intensive.

3 TIPS

1. Bidding on your Brand

Bidding on your brand is probably a good idea, even though you may rank first for the term in SEO. If you have a double listing within the SERP you achieve two things: one: your brand gets more value and two: you get more reinforcement. You might get less clicks on Organic sources, but overall you will get more visits and probably a higher overall CTR because of reinforcement. In addition, branded searches usually have a strong conversion rate and very low CPC, more visits lead to more profit.

2. PPC & SEO working together

An SEO & PPC cooperation increases the total search traffic since with PPC you can show keywords that you don’t have organic rankings for and vice versa. The key here is to target the high value keywords -even though they are not top ranking in organic search. If you know the strengths of PPC and SEO you can make them work together in harmony.

3. PPC for link building

As you know SEO is more and more about content. You probably have gone to great lengths to create great content and promote your site, but still you haven’t seen the traffic you targeted for. At that point using PPC is a great and low cost way to spread your content to a large amount of users investing on long tail, non-commercial keywords. Social platforms are a great way to achieve this, as people that browse and like your content are more likely to share it. So use PPC to promote your SEO!

As we have seen SEO & PPC work well together in many ways if seen as supplementary strategies to promoting your site. What I am suggesting is a “paradigm shift” on how these two can work together. The benefits are valuable and long term.

They cooperate within the SERP to develop an increased organic traffic while also using a responsible and intelligent way to inform a data driven successful SEO strategy by utilizing PPC as a starting point. We can use AdWords and take Google’s own quality measures to use as a guide for an informed SEO strategy, as well as other ways that can be practically and effectively combined. These two traffic sources are cut from the same cloth and by neglecting one of them your overall strategy will be lacking.
Only a few brands truly take advantage of combined strategies across paid and organic search. Advertisers should think of how consumers interact with their search efforts, including ad copy and keywords.

Posted by : Kostas Tsiamis