Guide to combining PPC and SEO for Powerful Results

If you’re not intricately familiar with the world of digital marketing, PPC and SEO may seem like utterly disparate strategies. However, while fundamentally different, they are not polar opposites. Instead, you should view PPC and SEO as the flip sides of a single coin. 

In reality, PPC and SEO perfectly complement one another when people want a successful and complete search strategy. With that in mind, we’re going to go over some of the various ways in which you can work on combining PPC and SEO for powerful results!

Visibility

The first way you can combine PPC and SEO is to maximize your SERP exposure. While doing this, it’s essential to explain to a client why both short-term PPC and long-term SEO are needed to have organic and viable rankings. 

For instance, many clients ask to lower their PPC budget as soon as they rank first for a vital search keyword. But that’s not something you should do right away — remember, the first couple of SERPs will always be the result of PPC. If you want to dominate search results, you need to do it both with paid and organic results. This will provide an immense boost to your traffic, but it will help with brand recognition as well. When you appear in both organic and paid spots, people will immediately recognize you as an industry leader in any given niche. That’s why there are always PPC options to take into consideration, even when you’re satisfied with your current SERP positions. 

Data Sharing

When you’re running a PPC campaign simultaneously with an organic SEO one, you will have two data sets to analyze. You’ll be able to form comparative analyses on the PPC and organic keywords that produce the most satisfactory conversion rates, for instance. In turn, that’s something you can use to perform optimizations on your overall marketing strategy. 

Content Similarities

When a piece of content or copy works in PPC, chances are that it will work when you’re doing organic SEO as well. Pay-per-click campaigns give you the most detailed information on what ads produce the highest conversion rates. That gives you a rough idea of what kind of page content, metadata, and title tags will work for organic rankings.

The beauty of PPC is that you can immediately see what kind of page attributes work and which don’t and then apply your newfound knowledge to the organic campaign as well. In comparison, testing the metas and titles organically would take ages to yield results. 

E-Commerce

In regards to e-commerce, Google is continuing to improve its quality-of-life features for both vendors and prospective buyers. For instance, PPC ads can directly link to particular product pages these days. This means that a PPC ad can showcase the product and user reviews, leading users directly to the sales page and shortening the number of steps in any sales funnel. If you’re using an e-commerce platform, this will boost your organic traffic to individual product pages as well. 

Website Search Data

The crucial point of PPC ads is to see what specific keywords are most often used by your target audience while they search for services and products. Obviously, if you’re not a huge corporate conglomerate, you can’t pay for clicks on common keywords indefinitely. However, PPC can show you what keywords you should focus on in your SEO efforts as well for organic results. 

Plus, if you let users use site search, you will further be able to analyze the different terms that they make use of. That way, you’ll have additional insights into the online search habits of your customers and their needs. 

Dealing With Bad PR

From time to time, one thing is inevitable — a disgruntled customer will talk trash about your company online. And make no mistake, this is something that happens even if you do everything right. As your company scales up, an employee is bound to make a public misstep, or you’ll simply be dealing with an irrational person.

In that situation, many people don’t realize that a combination of SEO and PPC can be an excellent method of damage control. Mainly, this rests on the first use of combining PPC and SEO that we’ve talked about here — online visibility. 

When you do keyword research on a specific incident, you can actively control what most people see on that topic. For instance, when the British Petroleum company caused an oil spill in the Gulf, they were facing terrible PR. In that situation, they opted for paying for PPC results related to the “oil spills” keyword and its variants. They created a page that talked about what they did to clean up the damage, and their PPC ads actually linked to that instead of news about the spill. 

Social Media

No media landscape changes more rapidly than that of social media — fads and topics go from hot news to outdated stuff in a matter of days. That being said, social media are also the biggest platforms for online advertising besides Google. YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook all provide you with their own platforms for PPC and other targeted ads. This is not only great for product visibility, but it can also help you with audience targeting in SEO. Such campaigns can uncover interesting details regarding the broadest possible audience for your service or product, and aid you in more closely defining a good SEO strategy.