In today’s digital world, there’s nothing more important when trying to promote a website than high-quality content and strong SEO and PPC strategies. And while all these terms surround us every step of the way, there are only a few people out there who really understand how everything works.
This article aims to clarify what SEO and PPC are and how they can be combined for improved results when it comes to promoting a business online.
So, get ready for a journey in which you will discover more about PPC and SEO, how to do SEO, and combine PPC and SEO for a better outcome.
Search Engine Optimization
That’s right. If this is the very first time you have ever heard about SEO, you need to know what it stands for. Once you know it means Search Engine Optimization, you already have a broad idea of what SEO can do for your website. It will optimize it for search engines so that when random people search for various phrases on the Internet, your website will pop up in the first results.
If you’re expecting to find a secret recipe on how to improve SEO, we’re afraid you got your hopes too high. Since SEO is a very dynamic domain, influenced by thousands of variables, there’s no secret plan that you can apply to all sites and make them popular for search engines.
Instead, good SEO is based on two major components: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page refers to all those tips and tricks you can apply to your website and make it friendlier for search engines. Start with adding meta tags to your pages, doing thorough keyword research for each article you post so that you have a clear idea of what users search for, and integrate those keywords on your website so that it will be displayed as a top result.
On the other hand, off-page SEO strategies refer to all the things you need to do to make your website increase its authority in the niche or domain you’re active in. Getting backlinks is a popular way to increase your website authority, and it’s quite simple. If there are multiple links towards your website on other sites that contain valuable information, the search engines will also tag your website as containing qualitative content. Off-page SEO also refers to the way you organize the website; however, that’s more technical, and we’re not going to go into depths right now.
Pay per Click
The Pay Per Click system has the same goal as SEO – to make your website or business better known on the Internet. However, the means through which this goal is achieved is different from SEO. Through PPC, the advertiser pays search engines, other website owners, or even a network of websites whenever an ad leading to its website is clicked.
In other words, PPC can be described as a shortcut to get users on your website without spending all that time on increasing the value of SEO. You just bid on the strongest keywords for your site and then initiate a PPC campaign so that the search engine will automatically display your result as an ad when the user inserts a certain keyword.
Even though the models of the two advertising systems are completely different, it doesn’t mean you can’t use them together to boost your chances of reaching a broader audience. And that’s exactly what we’re going to focus on in the following paragraphs – how to use SEO tools and PPC ads together.
Using PPC to Leveraging the SEO Keyword Strategy
If you paid attention so far, you would already notice one section of both systems that focused on the same element – keywords. You can rely on an SEO checker for keyword analysis, and most of the time, the results are pretty good. However, what if you could take that to the next level and use PPC to implement the best on-page SEO strategy?
Instead of relying on keywords that the competition used and scored high, you can set up a PPC campaign with the desired keywords for the website and see how it performs. If you get enough clicks through PPC advertisement, it’s usually the green light to unleash the full power of SEO services using the same keywords.
PPC Results to Help SEO Analytics
Another way you can combine the power of SEO and PPC is by using a PPC campaign to test the SEO on your site. It’s known that SEO marketing can’t really be measured in real-time since it takes some time for the search engines to index your new pages and determine if your website scores high in its algorithms.
However, through a well-executed PPC campaign, you can check out what the most searched keywords are, the most typed links, or what meta tags get the most clicks. This provides valuable data to plan the next local SEO strategy and develop even further.
Using PPC to Improve SEO Conversion Rates
Through proper SEO optimization, you managed to bring your site to the first page of search engines. Congrats to you! You found out the secret of good SEO. However, even this position doesn’t always guarantee your visitors will turn into conversions. The term “conversion” is used for visitors that buy a product or service from your website. So, even if customers find you easily and they know it’s good because the search engines display it in top results, it doesn’t immediately ensure conversions.
Some customers may browse your website and then go to check the same products somewhere else, and most of them never come back. By checking out the analytics from what pages and products got the most visits, connected with the demographics, you can launch a PPC campaign to boost those products especially. After all, it’s a lot easier for a potential customer to just click an ad with the product instead of searching the product or the website on Google.
PPC and SEO Combined to Improve Your Brand
By now, you have a clear idea of what Google SEO does and what you can get out of PPC campaigns. Even if the latter brings inorganic traffic, if your website is well-organized from an SEO perspective, you can still get a lot of organic traffic out of those inorganic visitors.
These users discover your website and like the way information is organized and how you explore certain subjects. Then, they will come back to check out other products or services, thus generating a lot of organic traffic. Not to mention that there’s a huge chance that a user who likes your website will recommend it to friends and family, thus increasing the traffic.
In other words, even if in the SEO analysis your websites rank really well, it’s worth investing in PPC campaigns as well and reaching out to that audience that wouldn’t usually use search engines to look for the products or services that you’re offering. Once you bring these people to your website, it’s the SEO quality level that will keep them engaged and make them return/ recommend.
Conclusion
Creating websites, combining good SEO techniques with PPC, can make your site known to your target market. Like many other things in the digital world, you shouldn’t hope to get miraculous results using only SEO or PPC. The few advantages described above stand proof that you need to mix and match until you get the perfect way to advertise your website and business so that people hear about you. If you don’t want to invest fortunes on PPC, you can focus your efforts on strong SEO both on-page and off-page, and then run some PPC campaigns, just to make sure you reach enough people that would eventually grow to like your website enough so that they will come back. That’s the best-case scenario for every PPC campaign since you pay for that visitor only once while you continue to enjoy the benefits of him returning.
As stated several times across the article, we don’t offer a secret recipe here as there is no such thing. These are the best practices that we’re aware of right now, and we encourage all our readers with experience in the domain to share their tactics. Feel free to use the comments section to let us know if we missed something or add your own thoughts on the subject.
Author’s Bio
Thomas Glare is a freelance SEO content writer for more than 4 years now. He started as an online casino employee but soon discovered the magic of words and how they can be put together to make search engines click. Ever since, he spends a lot of time looking up for new SEO techniques to develop excellent content and, of course, writes about it so that more and more people are engaged in the subject.