Wondering how PPC and SEO can work together to maximise your conversions? Ramial takes us through 7 ways these channels can join forces to achieve great results.

7 WAYS PPC & SEO CAN WORK TOGETHER TO MAXIMISE YOUR BRAND VISIBILITY

After building up years of experience in Digital Marketing & having now become a PPC Specialist here at Clickthrough, I’ve witnessed some great results achieved when PPC has joined forces with SEO.

When I’ve seen these two channels work together, they’ve both seen the benefits for their campaigns, whether the goal being brand awareness, lead generation or driving action & sales.

So why should you consider bringing these two channels together? Read on, as I take you through some key benefits of letting these two friendly rivals combine their efforts.

1. Maximise client Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranking.

Despite PPC ads featuring at the top of SERP rankings, ensuring you’re appearing highly for organic results will ensure your website is the only thing consumers see. For example, users who deliberately avoid ads will still be able to see your brand at the top of organic results, driving the same level of business.

Taking up as much space as possible on the Search Engine Ranking Positions can do the world of good for the brand awareness of any website, which leads me nicely onto my next point.

2. Add Power to Your Brand Awareness.

Increasing brand awareness by occupying more SERP real estate can lead to an increase in users driving action or visiting the website directly - even long after their initial search. If potential customers do not convert immediately, appearing both within the adverts and organic rankings can lead to a stronger brand awareness, thus resulting in more powerful conversion rates across the board, long term.

For example, if a user searches for the same service / product 10 times (something I often do before buying!), and sees the same company again and again, through paid and organic results this has the potential to strongly influence their consideration.

3. Identify your strongest cross-channel keywords

If you have a PPC campaign which is smashing it, then there’s no doubt you’ll also have a list of your favourite keywords from this campaign. Have you twigged that you can use this to smash your SEO for these keywords too? Your best PPC keywords could also be your best SEO keywords.

By integrating keywords that are doing well in your paid strategy into your organic strategy, the enhanced visibility and traffic could make a significant difference (as we’ve discusses above). Moreover, PPC also lets you test new keywords which you may ultimately decide to optimise organically as the turnaround is very fast – simply set your keywords, write your adverts and boom! Your adverts will be live and, as opposed to SEO, you would not have to wait for a crawl to start ranking and seeing performance.

4. Build more powerful Remarketing campaigns

If you are maximising the use of both channels, understandably you will be receiving more traffic. This will give you freedom to build much larger Audience lists (and understand more about your consumers). Ultimately, your Remarketing campaigns will be more powerful, and it will also be easier to build better brand loyalty + bring in more direct or referral traffic.

5. Enhance your strategy by analysing your data

The more data you have, the better decisions you can make and the more you can learn about how your industry performs online as well as your consumers behaviour, and perhaps what areas you can strengthen on. By combining all sets of data, you can develop some useful charts which will draw a bigger picture on how you can improve both your PPC & SEO campaigns together for best long-term results.

6. Building campaigns for humans

Though both PPC and SEO have keywords at their core, a strong SEO performance is increasingly reliant on having a great User Experience Design and improving sites usability for humans. Taking care over these aspects of your site ties in perfectly with best practices for PPC, as by optimising your landing pages you can lead to high conversion rates for your paid search campaigns, along with reducing the cost.

7. A more efficient and stronger advertising model.

This benefit is by far my favourite. As much as I love working on PPC campaigns, is this a channel you want your business to rely on long term? Hypothetically, all it takes is one technical error, or to click one button to turn PPC campaigns off and that could be it for a business. By taking care over your SEO strategy and making it a strong part of your marketing mix, you’ll be giving yourself two avenues of traffic acquisition, which contributes to a more sustainable advertising model overall.

While a properly maintained SEO strategy might prove to be more cost-efficient in the long term, PPC campaigns really come into their own with the flexibility on offer for fast turn-around, instantly running adverts and the ability to push visibility with an increased budget – something that proves useful on events such as Black Friday & Christmas. Plus, remember how we talked about direct traffic as a result of brand awareness? This turns these two sources of traffic into three, increasing your users even further!

Ultimately, you will want as many avenues as possible to ensure that your business has every chance of surviving online; so, if this means adding Social Media and Referral traffic to PPC, SEO & Direct traffic, then this would be useful for any business in maximising their visibility.

Conclusion

 Both PPC and SEO work differently, however they also share lots in common, especially the end goal of driving relevant traffic to a website. PPC can achieve this quickly through paid traffic; whereas SEO requires consistent optimisation to climb SERP rankings organically.

One of the most important things to remember is that both are keyword-driven strategies, and both also heavily rely on the optimisation of websites, whether it be best practise user experience on landing pages or long-term keyword optimisation. This ultimately requires research, optimisation and testing of keywords & website content. If all of these are aligned with best practises - each strategy can then complement each other, and many previous case studies have concluded improved overall campaigns performance.

Looking to talk to a search marketing expert about your PPC or SEO advertising campaigns? Talk to one of our specialists today.