We’ve all heard the stories of companies that have grown through the power of search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search advertising (PPC). These two powerful marketing channels are both useful in their own right. Still, it sometimes needs to be clarified how to integrate these tools to create an even stronger digital strategy.
This post will explore the benefits and challenges of integrating your SEO and PPC campaigns into one cohesive effort. This way, you can optimize your results and develop a more effective online presence that drives revenue growth for years!
Why you should integrate your PPC and SEO campaigns
Integrating your PPC and SEO campaigns can improve performance and provide valuable insight for future campaigns. Unfortunately, these search marketing strategies often operate independently. However, they both focus on developing keyword strategies, content, and tactics to attract more visitors and sales.
Before covering why you should integrate your PPC and SEO campaigns, let’s examine each strategy.
What is SEO? Search engine optimization is the practice of including content on your site that can improve your site’s visibility to search engines and their users. In other words, SEO can help your site appear more often in relevant searches.
What is PPC? Pay-per-click is a form of paid advertising. It brings immediate results and traffic from search engines. Your website will quickly receive traffic when you set up a PPC paid ad campaign. You can do this through Google Ads or other social media channels.
The benefits of integrating your SEO and PPC campaigns
SEO and PPC complement each other in several ways.
For example, SEO can help identify keyword opportunities and increase your site’s visibility in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Meanwhile, PPC allows you to optimize those keywords by driving qualified traffic. These two strategies work together to improve customer experience and reduce costs overall.
- Identify keyword opportunities
You can use PPC to test and measure keywords in the short term and identify keyword opportunities for SEO. Then you can optimize your SEO content to include those high-value keywords, reducing your overall cost-per-acquisition over time. In other words, use your paid search data to identify topics to write SEO content about. The same applies to identifying keyword opportunities for PPC. Search engine visibility audit and keyword research sessions can identify the top searches for your industry, which can then be used for bidding in your PPC campaigns.
- Increase your site’s visibility in Search Engine Results Pages
Combining SEO and PPC tactics can help you rank better on Google and thus improve your site’s visibility. Here’s one example from a Forbes article: “PPC ads appear at the top of search results, so when you run them, people see them first whenever they search for your product or service. And if you rank high for the same keyword already, users will also see your company in the organic search results.”
- Maximize keyword success
You can use SEO to target keywords that offer volume but are unprofitable for paid search. And PPC can be used for profitable terms but rank poorly in organic results. Another example is to identify high-value, expensive PPC keywords and work on your organic SEO to rank for those terms.
- Technical SEO can optimize PPC
Technical SEO optimizations are a powerful optimization you can make to support a PPC campaign. For example, improving site speed is considered an SEO tactic to increase ranking, but it’s also a factor in quality score and conversion rates for paid campaigns. Users aren’t willing to wait around for a page to load just because they came through a paid ad.
SEO + PPC Integration Challenges
With SEO and PPC, you have two channels with different goals, metrics, and audiences. Integrating these two channels can be challenging because of those differences.
The first challenge is that SEO focuses on long-term results while PPC is focused short-term. A good example of this will be if you’re trying to increase your organic rankings for a keyword like “SEO.” You should focus on building backlinks or improving your content quality over time so that you rank higher organically in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).
On the other hand, if your goal is to get more clicks from people searching for “SEO” then using paid advertising would make sense since it allows users who want information about SEOs but don’t know much about them yet to find out more quickly without having too much effort put into trying to figure out what exactly makes up an effective strategy.
Integrating your SEO and PPC campaigns can take time and effort. It’s best to balance driving traffic to your website, which PPC does, and ensure you rank higher in search engines for relevant keywords (SEO).
If you don’t get this right, then you’ll end up spending money on clicks that won’t convert into customers or sales because they’re coming from people who are not interested in what you have to offer.
Integrating your SEO and PPC campaigns can be a great way to optimize your results. By combining these two types of marketing, you can reach new customers and increase sales by leveraging both paid and organic search. However, some challenges may make this difficult for some businesses or agencies, such as lack of time or resources needed for both campaigns. If this sounds like something that could benefit your business, then we encourage you to consider integrating these two types of marketing!
If you need advice on integrating your PPC and SEO strategies or want to find out what PPC and SEO can do for your business – get in touch today.