The effects of PPC campaigns and SEO are quite complementary and can be amplified when you implement both within your digital marketing strategy. At the top of SERPs are paid search ads and below are all organic search results – it would be best to capture your audience at their point of search through both of these channels. Therefore it is important to know how to optimise your digital marketing strategy between PPC and SEO.
Here are five ways to use PPC to support your SEO efforts:
Identify Keywords That Convert
A significant advantage of PPC campaigns on your SEO efforts is that you can identify which of your keywords are resulting in conversions. Identifying your best-converting keywords can help with choosing what keywords to focus on regarding keyword rankings. You wouldn’t want to funnel your efforts into a high volume keyword that doesn’t convert well, would you? The major upside of using PPC to kick off your SEO is the saving of time. Test out keywords through PPC and find out what keywords don’t work, so you can drop them from your efforts and push your resources towards other more important keywords.
Most of your keyword research should have been completed through Google Adwords Keyword Planner Tool so knowing how many clicks you can get for keywords and analyse the interactions and site engagement of users over time will be very useful in understanding how you should approach your link building – especially keywords, anchor text and for what landing page to rank for specific keywords.
Content Optimization on Landing Pages
With conversion tracking setup on your site, you understand what types of actions your site visitors are performing. Whether it be lead through a signup, clicking on a link to a page, clicking on an element on the page or so on, it is a great advantage to know how well your landing page content engages a visitor and achieves leads and sales.
Through the fast testing of ads, you can identify which copy entices clicks and interactions from your audience.
Using the best performing PPC ad copy and implementing aspects of it into your organic content strategy can help you write up compelling title tags, meta descriptions and page content.
Create More Link Building Opportunities
If you play your cards right with driving leads through paid search campaigns, you can utilise your gathered leads to acquire social shares and backlinks on blogs and websites. For example, you can bulk email out a newsletter or promotion where if the person shares your post on social media or their blog, they can receive a special offer or discount on your site.
You can bring in more exposure to your site content when your paid search audience browses your site. Internal page visibility is a big bonus if you have lots of quality linkable content because you never know if your audience might share your content. If you’re very confident in your site content, you could even set up some of your ads to lead directly to your linkable assets.
Capture Your Missed Audiences
If you’re starting off fresh with a website that doesn’t have any popular keywords, you can start building up brand awareness and driving traffic through the use of PPC campaigns. With the ability to bid on your non-ranking keywords, you can compensate for your low keyword visibility and capture the audience that you would’ve otherwise missed.
SEO tends to take months to gain real traction regarding results, and as a long term strategy that is quite dependent on the competition in your line of business, you can straight away get some action happening before you even hit the top keyword positions. You’ll save 6-12 months if you’re not on the first page already and if you’re already on the first page, it might take as long even to reach the top 5 results. Sometimes businesses will be time constrained, so PPC would be a good option to acquire traffic on the first page while SEO gradually improves.
Remarketing
Being able to bring back traffic to your site is useful especially if your audience happens to click on multiple ads and organic results on the SERPs – your competitors, your ads and also your organic search results. You won’t always win over your audience so being able to pull them back through remarketing ads is a blessing in that there are additional chances of a conversion.
Sometimes your landing pages for paid search or organic search might see high bounce rates due to the user having too many options available from the search results, so it is important to make sure that your remarketing ads are written such that they are compelling and appeal to the audience’s emotions and senses. You’d want to use language that entices them to come back to your site and take action. Imagine being ranked in the top 5 and a user finds you through organic search but holds off a purchase decision or simply forgets about your site. Ad impressions will remind people of your site whether it be through regular search ads or display ads, but remarketing takes the cake for pulling them back once they’ve clicked on any of those ads.
Raymond Tang is a digital marketing specialist at Sparro Digital Marketing Agency based in Sydney, Australia and has substantial interests in sharing his knowledge and insights in the digital marketing space. Working across SEO, PPC and content, he aims to improve the online presence of brands he works with, learning more every day and sharing tips with others in the field.
