How do SEO and PPC Work Together?
When brands start getting involved in digital marketing, they make the mistake of only focusing on one particular aspect. For example, a brand may want to hire an SEO firm to boost their SEO efforts or contact a PPC agency to start paid media campaigns.
However, what many brands don’t realize is that the different forms of digital marketing work together to boost each other’s effectiveness.
Effectively using content marketing can make your SEO efforts much more effective, while using paid advertisements on social media platforms can make your social media marketing produce better results.
With that in mind, how do two of the biggest forms of digital marketing, SEO and PPC, play off each other and work together? Why should you engage in both forms of digital marketing rather than focusing on just one? Let’s take a look.
Table of Contents
Search Result Coverage
A huge reason why you should have both SEO and PPC campaigns working together is to ensure that you have enough coverage when it comes to search engine result pages. A huge problem with paid media is some users simply skip over paid search results and go right to the organic results.
However, if you also organically rank high for those search engine results, you can cover this weakness and still reach these users. However, some users may not care about whether or not a search engine result is organic or paid, meaning that your paid media will be more effective than your organic SEO efforts. Combining the two types of digital marketing ensures that you have extensive coverage when it comes to digital marketing, meaning you’ll reach a much larger user base.
Building Awareness
One of the main areas in how SEO and PPC work together is through building awareness. When you run both organic SEO campaigns and PPC campaigns, users are much more likely to be continually exposed to your brand. For example, a user may see your website rank highly on a search engine result page but then decide to click on another option.
However, if the same user later sees a paid advertisement for your website, they will recognize your brand and be much more likely to click on the advertisement. The familiarity and awareness that the two types of digital marketing can build through continued exposure can really be effective and can eventually drive a lot more traffic to your website.
Keyword Targeting
When engaging in SEO, it can sometimes be difficult to tell how effective your campaigns will be. SEO campaigns could take months to come to fruition and produce results, meaning that sometimes it can be tricky to gauge how successful a campaign targeting specific keywords will be.
Thankfully, PPC campaigns can allow you to test the waters. PPC campaigns will provide you with results and metrics much sooner than SEO campaigns, giving you valuable information on what the best keywords to target are. You can then take the information you glean from your PPC campaigns and use it to ensure your SEO campaigns are that much more successful.
Retargeting
While SEO can be extremely effective at getting consumers to your website, it doesn’t always lead to your conversion goals being met. Your SEO efforts may get someone to your website, but if it leads to nothing at all, then you’ve really gained little in the grand scheme of things.
However, when you combine SEO with PPC, you can turn those fruitless visits into something meaningful. Visitors who don’t reach your conversion goal can then be targeted with paid advertisements, allowing your brand to stay fresh in the consumer’s mind.
In addition, these retargeting ads can be extremely effective at enticing consumers to come back and do business with you, resulting in many more leads being generated. It is much easier to reach a consumer familiar with your brand and visited your website, so you should definitely take advantage of the retargeting that PPC allows and combine it with your SEO efforts.