How PPC and SEO Should Work Together for the Best Results

Shane Barker

5 years ago

Digital marketing is evolving at a fast pace. A marketing strategy that works one month for your brand may falter the next, leaving you high and dry.

This makes it tricky for businesses to come up with strategies that’ll meet their customers’ expectations. But a holistic approach to digital marketing could be the solution. And instead of worrying about whether to use SEO or PPC in your campaign, integrating the two could actually improve your results.

What Does That Mean?

Rather than running SEO and PPC at varying intervals, integrate the two to drive more sales by increasing your brand’s visibility and traffic. Higher traffic means there is a better chance for you to drive conversions.

In fact, an Adept case study found that integrating SEO and PPC resulted in a 55% boost in organic sessions for a B2B company. Further, they achieved a 48% increase in revenue and a 223% increase in ROI from their paid campaign.

Investing solely in paid campaigns will give you a weak organic presence. That means you’ll pay through the nose to get clients in the years to come.

And if you rely 100% on SEO, it’ll take you a while before you can see some returns. To be precise, SEO is more like a snowball that takes time to gather momentum. So there’s no reason for you to choose one or the other.

By combining SEO and PPC, you can reap numerous benefits. These include an increase in paid clicks, organic traffic, proceeds, and savings in ad spends.

Tips for Integration

Here are three ways to lift your digital marketing to new heights by integrating SEO and PPC:

1. Increase Your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Visibility

So you’ve gotten your site to rank first on Google. But before you throw that party to celebrate, make sure you take note of the four websites listed before yours.

Many brands call it a day when they rank number one for the search term they were targeting. But what they fail to see is the top results on most pages are paid ads. To ensure your potential customers always find you at the very top, above everyone else, don’t forget to invest in PPC.

To rank for keywords you aren’t yet ranking in, it’s crucial to run paid ads. This is the fastest way to boost your visibility on the SERPs (search engine results pages) as it’ll take SEO some time to bear any fruit.

Image via Ppchero

Here’s an example that clearly depicts how Amazon has effectively integrated SEO and PPC to their advantage. The e-commerce site has aced their competitors in the top paid results as well as organic search results against the keyword “rent movies.”

Dominating both paid and organic searches will create the impression that your brand has an established presence in the market.

2. Leverage PPC Data to Optimize your Content

SEO relies heavily on your content. It is the factor that drives domain authority, links, and traffic. But it’ll only work when people read, link, and share your content. PPC is an easy way to lure an audience in and promote your content.

But you can’t get started with paid campaigns right away. In fact, you should first A/B test different keywords in order to identify the best ones that can give you the desired results.

For example, using “digital + marketing + services” will display your ad every time someone conducts a search against these keywords in any order.

A close examination of the search terms used by people when they click your ads will show you their intent. In other words, it will give you an understanding of what your target audience is looking for. You can then use the information to optimize your content.

This makes targeting relevant audiences much easier because you will know what people are looking for. Gather the top-converting long-tail keywords from your paid campaign and then use them to optimize your content. Not only will it lure a relevant audience, but it will also help you improve your rankings for relevant keywords.

For example, let’s say that a high percentage of people who clicked your ad for digital marketing services searched for “best digital marketing services in the US.” In this scenario, you can publish an article that’ll guide people on how to choose the best digital marketing firm. If you manage to produce a valuable piece of content, it could attract a lot of readers and potential customers.

Furthermore, this can prove really beneficial for you, as your immediate competitors may not be producing this type of content.

3. Negate Fraudulent Click Activities and Grow Your Sales

Click fraud can eat your ad spend. It’s a grave issue that needs to be negated if you want to grow your sales. Pixalate reported that during January 2017, 19.9% of desktop clicks were fraudulent. The overall desktop click fraud rates have increased by 20.8% between January-April 2017.

Image via Pixalate

Failing to address fraudulent click activities can cause thousands of dollars in lost budget and potential sales. When you become a victim of this activity, it means you mostly attracted bots or visitors with malicious intent. As a result, you never get the opportunity to sell your goods or services. And you still end up paying hundreds of dollars for those fraudulent clicks.

The worst part is that not only do fraudulent clicks negatively affect your paid campaign, but they also hamper your organic search rankings. That’s because people with malicious intent have wrecked your dwell time - the average time visitors spend on a website after clicking a link. So despite a higher CTR (click-through rate), you’ll experience a low dwell time and a high bounce rate.

This brings us to an important question - Does Google really use dwell time as a ranking factor or is it just a hoax?

To get some solid proof of this, Larry Kim conducted a test that looked at CTR over time. And according to his findings, it certainly looks like search engine algorithms are recompensing high dwell time with better search positions.

However, by integrating SEO and PPC, you can eliminate fraudulent clicks. For example, you can use Google AdWords and Google Analytics to keep an eye on sudden spikes in traffic. Especially, if they don’t match with your budget. Google Analytics reports will clearly reveal to you which traffic is coming from AdWords.

You can also check for sudden conversion drops, especially when conversions are low despite strong traffic. By frequently reviewing this ratio, you’ll be able to identify any strange changes that do not match with actions taken by you.

Another scenario could be the sudden surge in traffic from weird locations. If it’s one or two clicks, then it’s usually fine. But if the traffic from a location that you aren’t targeting has significantly increased, it may well be a result of fraudulent clicks.

Conclusion

Both PPC and SEO have their own pros and cons. But the good news is that you can use both to cover up the flaws of the other. Most of all, the integrated effort will help you to attract the most relevant potential clients, which means there is a high probability of driving more sales.

Feel free to share your success stories and tips for combining SEO and PPC in the comments below.