How PPC and SEO Work Together

Does your company separate its search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) teams into distinct silos? If these teams never speak to each other in your business or digital marketing agency, you’re limiting your ability to maximize traffic and conversion opportunities. Digital marketing strategy is a dynamic environment and combining insights and resources from the paid and organic world is the best way to meet goals and exceed expectations.

PPC and SEO have similar objectives: increasing viewership for websites (regarding clicks), raising conversion rates and lowering costs, but they achieve it through different means. It stands to reason that combining the two methods only increases the prominence and leads to a more successful search strategy.

The Basics

If you’re confused about the difference between SEO and PPC, it’s easy to separate them into two distinct categories:

• SEO uses on-page optimization, including altering metadata and keywords in content, so that search engines can crawl a site and rank it bases on relevance. Some additional factors contribute to SEO value and misconceptions about how it works today.
• PPC is a strategy where businesses pay for advertisements on various platforms including Google AdWords, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram to drive traffic back to relevant landing pages on their sites.

By integrating SEO and PPC, there are many possible benefits, including an increase in organic traffic, increased paid clicks, savings in ad spend and increased profits.

But if you silo your teams, you’ll never achieve those goals. So, here’s how to utilize the resources of paid and organic search to help the other out.

Share Information

SEO can help paid advertising and vice versa by sharing information from each team. While both departments’ work can get users to you or your client’s website, it’s high-quality content with SEO that keeps them there. Paid ads get to the user quickly, while results from SEO take longer to verify. PPC copy that’s performing well can be used to inform SEO and content strategy. If certain verbiage appeals to your key demographics, utilize it in key sections of the site.

There’s no question that SEOs and paid search analysts both work tirelessly to develop unique content, but they often don’t share their data or insights. One of the most important items they can share to strengthen both teams’ efforts is keywords.

Keyword Sharing

For paid campaigns and SEO efforts, you need the right keywords. They’re not necessarily aimed at the consumer at the same time in their sales process, but in both cases, they’re integral to the process. In the case of paid ads, strategists use keywords to target consumers who are closer to making a purchase or deciding on a conversion. In the SEO world, keywords are an essential part of ranking a website on search engines and developing keyword strategy.

With the increase of voice search in digital marketing, longer tail keywords and phrases are becoming even more common, so combining efforts can help both teams create a coordinated message from first glance at the product with SEO until final purchase with targeted ads.

Increase Your Social Media Visibility

Ad targeting has only increased in its specificity over the last several years. With social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, the PPC team creates ads that target incredibly specific groups. The results of these campaigns contain valuable data about key demographics for your product, which the SEO team can then use in turn to write new content and refine SEO strategy. As ad technology improves, the synergy between PPC and SEO will only grow, and targeting will get even more specific with machine learning and artificial intelligence tools.

Maximize the Ability to Own Google SERPs

One of the most important benefits to combining paid and organic efforts is added exposure on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Some companies are tempted to reduce or even eliminate PPC spend if they rank #1 for a given search term. However, it’s important to remember that for most results page, the first one to three results is paid ads. If you can dominate in both paid and organic search results, you can not only a great increase in traffic but give the impression to potential customers that you’re an important presence in your market.

Don’t keep your SEO and PPC teams from helping each other out. With Leverage Marketing’s satellite marketing services, all our services work together to meet and exceed your expectations.