Can SEO and PPC campaigns really work together? While these two digital marketing tactics may seem unrelated, it is crucial for businesses to implement both. By utilizing SEO and PPC campaigns together, companies can increase a website’s relevant visitors, grow the number of leads and boost overall sales.

To help explain the relationship between SEO and PPC, let’s see how they work together, how they affect one another and discuss some best practices when integrating.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, more commonly referred to as SEO, is the process of improving a website to increase rankings for relevant keyword searches. For example, an industrial equipment rental company may want to improve its ranking position for “industrial lift rental.” They can do this by including keyword-rich product descriptions, adding clear title tags and meta descriptions, improving the technical side of the website and gaining links from expert industrial journals. While there are a number of different ways to increase rankings, these are only a few tactics.

What is Pay-Per-Click?

Pay-per-click, or PPC, is the collection of search results shown in the top positions of Google listings. They usually have a green “ad” icon next to them, indicating a paid placement. These can appear in search engines other than Google, such as Bing, Yahoo! or even social media sites like Pinterest. The reason they’re called a “pay-per-click” is that a company only has to pay for the ads when clicked, not simply for showing up on a user’s device.

PPC is an affordable way to increase rankings for keywords that a site may not already show for. One aspect for companies to be mindful of is the cost of individual clicks. While some industries might see click costs hovering around $5, others can expect to pay $20 and above. This is due to industries and competition levels. Monitoring individual bid levels is essential for managing a healthy budget.

Which Tactic Affects the Other?

Is it SEO that affects PPC or is it PPC that affects SEO? Can they affect each other at all? Typically, no; having PPC ads doesn’t affect a website’s organic rankings and a site’s organic rankings won’t affect ads. With that being said, SEO and PPC can actually work together to enhance an overall digital marketing campaign.

How SEO and PPC Can Work Together

When used together, here are a few ways that SEO and PPC can increase traffic, leads and revenue.

SEO is focused on increasing rankings for key terms, with the intention that webpages will rank on the first page (hopefully the top three positions) on Google. By adding PPC ads to an already well-ranked SEO term, a business can dominate the search results page. This pushes competitor sites down — potentially onto the second result page of Google into no-mans land.

If a business’s website doesn’t already rank well organically, PPC is an easy way to rank at the top of the search results page, while working to boost SEO rankings. When implementing PPC ads, businesses are essentially creating a brand-new channel for driving relevant traffic to the website. Since PPC allows us to select the keyword themes we want to show up for, we’re able to draw in highly relevant “ready-to-purchase” audiences.

PPC is an immediate tactic, meaning as soon as you set up a campaign and put a budget behind it, you can start ranking. SEO, on the other hand, is a long-term strategy. Updates to a website’s SEO campaign take time, from research to implementation to the actual ranking adjustments. SEO is a long-term strategy that takes time. Part of the SEO process is creating keyword-rich copy for website pages. But how do you know which keywords are worth integrating into the copy? Since PPC ads are immediate, you can test which keywords have the highest search volumes, click-through rates and even conversions. When new keywords are discovered through a PPC campaign with solid data, SEO keywords and their corresponding copy have a better chance of higher performance. Since PPC tends to be a bit more inexpensive, keywords can be tested fast and with fewer resources.

Similar to the bullets above, SEO and PPC can provide valuable insights for one another. By utilizing both tactics, businesses receive a larger source of high-quality data to help guide the decision-making process of an overall marketing campaign. A few metrics that are valuable for both SEO and PPC campaigns are:

• Click-through rates
• Conversion rates
• Time on site
• Bounce rates
• Exit rates

By reviewing these metrics, companies can determine which keywords are bringing the best return, generating sales or sending unqualified users to a website (wasting valuable dollars).

If a website is already ranking well due to SEO efforts, it’s likely they are pulling in a large number of high-quality visitors. Most visitors, however, don’t make a purchase or fill out a lead form on their first visit. It takes multiple interactions for users to take action. Combining SEO with PPC remarketing allows ads to bring users back to a website to complete a form or purchase at a later time. If a user wants to purchase a can of paint but needs time to shop for colors and think about costs, a PPC retargeting ad will show up later, reminding users of products they may have previously forgotten about or were having trouble finding again.

While it’s true that SEO and PPC do not need to run together simultaneously, the benefits of doing so will give a business a leg up on their competitors — an additional channel, double the data and a complete, holistic marketing campaign. Are you new to SEO, PPC or possibly both? From creation and implementation to optimization and reporting, Godfrey can help. For more information on services or for a custom quote, reach out to us today! We can’t wait to connect.