In digital marketing, pay-per-click advertising, or PPC, and search engine optimization, or SEO, are two strong ways of increasing your online presence, website traffic, and conversions. These strategies are different, but they are very complementary. When used together, PPC and SEO can help a brand achieve maximum search engine presence, enhance the user experience, and increase overall marketing effectiveness.
Understanding PPC and SEO
Before we discuss how PPC and SEO work together, letโs understand each strategy. The paid advertising model referred to in the above case is PPC (pay per click), where businesses pay a bid to have their ads displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) on your search queries. These are two powerful strategies that help companies to improve their online visibility, drive traffic, and increase conversions. We have already mentioned that though these strategies are distinct, they are highly complementary.
PPC gives you instant traffic and visibility, but SEO takes longer to show results. Once your site starts ranking well, you get free organic traffic that lasts forever.
PPC and SEO: How They Work Together
While PPC and SEO are quite different, they carry more weight when working together. Hereโs how these two strategies work together:
1. Increased Visibility in Search Results
The main benefit of using both PPC and SEO is that you can dominate search engine results pages (SERPs). When your website shows up in organic search results (SEO) and as a paid ad (PPC), youโre increasing your brandโs visibility and credibility with users.
If your website appears in both the organic and paid sections, you have a better chance of being clicked on. The presence of this dual-brand increases click-through rates (CTR) because people are more likely to trust a brand they often see in search results.
2. SEO Optimization with Keyword Insights
Your PPC can help you work on your SEO in a better way. With PPC ads, you can get data quickly on which keywords are producing the most clicks and conversions. This keyword performance information can help you set your SEO priorities by picking the keywords with the best performance.
For instance, if you find a particular keyword that is converting well in your PPC campaigns, you can then concentrate on optimizing for that keyword in your content, meta tags, and landing pages.
3. Improved Conversion Rates
PPC and SEO can generate targeted traffic to your website but in different ways. PPC will let you write highly specific ads combined with custom messages and calls to action (CTAs). It makes it easier to optimize for conversions, making it then easier to control the user experience from the ad copy to the landing page.
On the other hand, SEO attracts users who are actively search for relevant content, products, or services. SEO organic traffic is more likely to engage with your website because users find your content through their own search intent.
By combining PPCโs ability to drive immediate traffic with SEOโs long-term organic traffic, businesses can get the best of both worlds, maximize conversions, and drive better quality leads.
4. Retargeting and Remarketing
The next way PPC and SEO work together is through remarketing. With PPC campaigns, you can retarget users who have visited your website but didnโt convert. Remarketing ads can help you remind those users to come back and finish their purchases.
SEO doesnโt provide you with remarketing capabilities directly, but the high-quality content you create through SEO will keep users engaged and encourage them to come back through organic search. The more users find value in your website, the more likely they are to convert over time, even if they first came from PPC ads.
5. Over Time, a Cost-Effective Strategy
PPC will drive instant traffic, but you need to constantly budget out the spend to stay visible. On the other hand, SEO is a more affordable long-term strategy that will bring free traffic once your website ranks well. Combining both strategies means that businesses can achieve the short-term results from PPC and the long-term organic benefits of SEO.
As youโre running PPC campaigns to bring traffic to this new product or service, you can work on your website simultaneously to make it more organic-friendly, so this paid traffic may be less dependent on paid campaigns in the long run.
