PPC and SEO can often be seen, and treated, as siloed entities in digital marketing efforts. With PPC providing immediate visibility on search engine results through paid clicks. SEO, on the other hand, offers slower but enduring results.
So which one would suit your business’ marketing strategy best? Do you take the red pill and focus on longevity with SEO? Or, do you take the blue pill and invest in immediate traffic with PPC? Fortunately, unlike Neo, this is not a decision you necessarily need to strictly make. In fact, blending the strengths of each may help to create a delectable marketing concoction, leveraged to suit your business’ needs.
You may now be wondering what the recipe is for this concoction. Whilst there is no simple secret formula, fundamentally, SEO and PPC in conjunction can increase your visibility on the search engine results page - leading to more clicks and brand exposure. But, PPC also offers some additional ingredients to complement SEO strategies further.
Keyword Insights
With PPC, insightful data can be collected quickly, in relation to keywords and search terms - this can be used to identify keywords with positive conversion performance data. Additionally, by analysing search term report data, PPC experts are able to identify additional keywords and phrases that are being made by potential customers. These insights can be strategically implemented within your SEO efforts.
Do you have a competitor organically dominating one of your targeted keywords? PPC may come to the rescue in such situations by bridging visibility gaps on the search engine results pages, especially for keywords that may be struggling to rank organically.
Ad Copy Testing
With the large amounts of traffic that PPC ads can reach in short amounts of time, this traffic can be used as virtual guinea pigs when it comes to testing alternative messaging and content. With PPC, variations of ad copies and various assets can be shown to the masses - allowing experts to assess which messaging appears to be more appealing to potential, and newly-acquired, customers. Again, this information can prove to be incredibly valuable when it comes to informing your SEO and content strategy.
Get To Know Your Audience
PPC offers quite precise geo-targeting and location insights. This information can be valuable, as conversion performance across different locations can be monitored and potentially optimised through SEO efforts.. For example, you may see that search volumes for a particular service vary across different locations.
Similar information can also be gathered on how your customers are responding to your website across different devices.
Gathering data as a marketer brings similar triumph as Gollum getting his hands on the ring - it’s absolutely precious. In addition to insights on location and device performance, PPC offers marketers valuable information on audiences. Take Google, for example. With its interest-based audience signals that you can utilise with Google Ads, you can craft an image of your business’ customer personas. This information can be used to enhance your content creation efforts and organic strategies.
The additional insights we have mentioned, coupled with the ability to quickly reach large volumes of traffic through PPC, can offer valuable capital to your marketing efforts. Various aspects of PPC can be added into your marketing blender to ensure strategies are well-informed and creatively crafted with what might be the secret formula ingredient: data.
A more holistic approach may yield better results for your SEO efforts especially as valuable content and understanding your audience are crucial for long-term success with SEO.
