4 Min Read
In our recent blog, Ditch What You Know, And Open Your Mind To Multi-Channel Search, we discussed the many ways in which you can go beyond SEO and PPC to improve your digital footprint, but let’s not leave the staples behind just yet. Today, we’ll discuss how by combining the two you can greatly benefit your business’ online presence and success.
SEO and PPC are integral parts of any digital marketing strategy, yet many businesses choose to focus solely on one while ignoring the other completely. While certain strategies are best suited for certain situations, e.g. small start-up companies choosing the cheaper, slower SEO over the more expensive, instant reward PPC; it is generally better for most to combine the two to gain the most success. Even some companies that offer these services themselves mainly treat them separately with little communication, when in fact their goal is the same: ‘to achieve the most effective results, as efficiently as possible’.
The main point to bring up first, in support of a combined SEO and PPC strategy, is that they provide a large amount of similar data that you can funnel into your digital marketing strategy such as:
Using this data, you can focus specific keywords that are gaining the most results and are rewarding you the most, enabling you to make smarter and quicker decisions to get the most out of it.
Tip: Double the strategies, double the data to work with.
Google conducted over 400 studies in 2011 on whether search ads cannibalise their organic traffic, if search ads were paused, would clicks on organic search results increase, and make up for the loss in paid traffic?
As revealed in the collection of all the data,
“The percentage of paid clicks that are not made up for by organic clicks when search ads are paused. The results were surprising. On average, the incremental ad clicks percentage across verticals is 89%. This means that a full 89% of the traffic generated by search ads is not replaced by organic clicks when ads are paused. This number was consistently high across verticals.”
This shows that using both PPC and SEO has a huge effect on the results generated. Conclusively, it is only when they work together on the same page that they provide the results you are looking for in these campaigns.
One of the most important results of combining SEO and PPC would be the extra visibility it provides. A solid strategy for both would provide added results on search engine result pages (SERPs) enabling your business to appear twice on the same page and double the clicks, which could potentially lead to doubling your revenue.
Since Google removed the ads in the sidebar to the right of search results, it has increased the value of paid for ads and drove up competition of organic search. With less room on page one for organic search, it becomes vital that you ensure every avenue is explored to elevate your business ahead of your competitors.
Along with this, providing high quality content enables information to appear about your business on the sidebar, increasing your visibility by a large margin. This further stresses the need for a multi-channel digital marketing approach starting with the combination of PPC and SEO.
Some business owners may cancel their PPC ad campaign once they have organically reached top 3, but don’t be too hasty. What’s better? A paid ad at the top of Google and top 3 organically, or one organic link that’s top 3? The choice is easy.
A combination of SEO and PPC can help in regards to bad reviews either left maliciously or genuinely. It is almost unavoidable in most industries and you must be prepared for when it does, or at least have strategies in place to dampen the effect. You can greatly control the conversions by controlling a certain term in regards to the negative PR.
A real-world example of this would be the BP Gulf Oil Spill in 2010, for a while after the event, BP paid for PPC ads to be linked to the keyword ‘oil spill’. This way, anyone searching for details on the oil spill would be shown a page about BP’s clean-up efforts at the top of the list, where a large majority of people would choose the first link shown. Similar strategies like this and a mix of SEO would go a long way to ensure your brand is protected from negative reviews.
In summary, when businesses merge SEO and PPC they gain excellent results from their digital marketing campaigns at an exponential rate. Reducing or completely shutting off one side of this partnership greatly reduces the results. Depending on your situation, this could be a great way to give your company the boost it deserves.
Get in touch with our Digital Next SEO and PPC teams today to see how they can help you get the results you’re striving for!
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