Whenever we hear the terms PPC and SEO in the same sentence in the world of digital marketing and online advertising, the phrase is usually along the lines of:
Should I use PPC or SEO for my business?
The answer…Both!
Here’s why you should be using both of these powerful marketing strategies to help you grow your business.
Let’s start of with the advantages and disadvantages of both
SEO: Advantages & Disadvantages
- High converting
- Appear for exact phrases your customers are searching for straight away, no waiting
- Free traffic
- Very trustworthy
The main disadvantage of SEO is that it’s quite time consuming as it can take weeks or even months for you to rank for you chosen keyword.
PPC: Advantages & Disadvantages
With PPC you can appear for exact phrases your customers are searching for straight away, you don’t need to wait, like you do with SEO, to appear at the top of Google.
The biggest disadvantage with PPC is that it’s not free, hence Pay Per Click (PPC). In order for your website to appear at the top of Google.
When you first launch your business, you are brand new and it will take a while for you to get eyeballs to your business using SEO strategies.
So PPC might be the way for you in the beginning, to get you the right customers for your business.
Whilst these PPC campaigns are running, you will be able to capture the way customers behave on your website, which keywords bring in the most customers, which landing pages convert the highest etcetera etcetera. You can then incorporate this data from your PPC campaigns into your SEO strategy.
How do you do this?
Well you can see from your PPC campaigns which keywords are bringing you the most leads and sales so all you need to do is feed this directly into your SEO strategy by optimising for these keywords on your website.
When you’re optimising your website, start optimising for the keywords which are the most valuable to your business so that you can rank high in the search engines and drive free high converting traffic to your website.
But make sure to also look at the competition of the keywords you are trying to rank for in your SEO campaigns so that you know who you are competing with and what you need to do to beat them.
Here’s another way PPC and SEO can work well together, let’s say you sell flowers locally and someone searches for “florists in my area”. This search is going to bring up a maximum of 4 paid ads at the top of the search engine results page as well as some organic results just below.
One important factor to instil in your potential customers is trust. When your business shows up in the ads as well as the organic results you’re able to build trust with them. The fact that you show up multiple times informs these users that google approves of your business and therefore they should visit your website. This will significantly increase the chances of them clicking either the ad or the organic result.
This is a great way in which PPC supports SEO very well!
And finally, Google themselves have mentioned that a good click through rate will help you boost your rankings. So when you are running your PPC campaigns, you can test different ads to identify which ads are giving you the best results and use this to improve your organic search listings.
You can use some of the descriptions and headlines from the ads in your paid campaigns to optimise your titles and descriptions for your organic results which will help you to increase your CTR (click through rate) and help you climb a few spots up in the search engine results page.
These are just a few ways we use SEO and PPC together and we hope that after watching this video you can now see why SEO and PPC are actually best friends.
