Here we will look at how to sync your PPC and SEO efforts to make sure you are getting the most from both campaigns.
You may not know it, but there’s a little rivalry going on in online marketing circles between PPC and SEO. PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, advertising is when you put advertisements on search results and pay whenever someone clicks on those ads. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is when you engineer your site to show up for searches for the keywords you want, bringing all kinds of free traffic to your website.
Online marketers are split about which approach is best to bring in business, but a judicious use of both can help your online business grow.
Benefits of PPC
PPC has some very important benefits:
- Allows you to instantly target keywords that make take months to show up for with SEO
- Allows you to show up for highly competitive keywords
- Guaranteed appearance
- Can yield higher-quality leads
- You can set your budget and know in advance how many contacts you will get
These benefits have to be weighed against the fact that PPC campaigns can be expensive, and they still depend on some well-crafted optimization work to get good results.
Benefits of SEO
SEO, on the other hand, is recommended because of it:
- Can bring in massive amounts of traffic
- Can bring in traffic for unanticipated keyword searches and long tail searches (where people search with sentences or near-sentences)
- May make your website look more credible because it’s not in paid searches
These have to be balanced against the fact that SEO is never certain. There’s no way to guarantee success, only deserve it.
Blending PPC and SEO
The best online marketing strategies use both PPC and SEO to help your business grow. SEO is used for bringing in the bulk of your website traffic and leads, but PPC is used strategically in some situations, such as:
- When you’re targeting a specific geographic location that won’t get enough traffic to justify optimization
- Trying to hit a timely topic before you can optimize for it
- Bringing in leads before SEO is fully achieved (which can take months)
- Targeting keywords that are valuable, but too competitive to optimize for