The success of your digital marketing strategy is paramount in today’s digital landscape. With consumers are increasingly using digital devices to connect and buy from businesses, it’s important to balance your digital marketing efforts.
Search marketing is crucial for growing and established businesses looking to attract customers. Search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) are two ways to improve your search rankings.
But what are the main differences? And how can an integrated strategy support your digital marketing strategy?
SEO vs PPC
The key difference between SEO and PPC is that one ranks organically on the search engines while the other gets paid.
PPC search ads appear at the top of a search engine results page, above SEO-generated listings. The traffic that comes to your website through PPC ads will cost you money. Organic search traffic is free.
SEO rankings can be more difficult to achieve on their own. An integrated PPC and SEO strategy is usually the best way to generate more traffic.
Every business is different, so you’ll need your own tailored PPC strategy that complements your other online activities.
Combine your SEO and PPC efforts
When developing your search strategy, there are a lot of things to consider. There are many advantages to creating an integrated PPC and SEO strategy. Here are some of the ways an integrated search strategy works:
Increase your presence in search engines
If you already have high-level SEO results, a strategic approach to your PPC efforts can increase your search engine presence even further.
Essentially, your PPC and SEO results will be displayed on the same page, helping you to dominate the search results page.
Recover missed clicks
Organic search rankings don’t automatically replace paid ad clicks when a PPC campaign ends. In fact, in a Google study, almost 90% of traffic generated by ads was not replaced by organic search results.
Continuing to integrate your search efforts will help you capture lost or missed clicks.
Reach previously interested users
Using tracking data, PPC can be used to retarget users who found your site through organic search. Although there are proposed changes to cookie tracking, it is still a valuable source of data.
Remarketing to interested users has become a key part of a digital marketing strategy in recent years.
Test new keywords
Doing SEO well often involves a large investment of time, research, financial investment. PPC allows you to quickly and inexpensively test the keywords you want to use in your organic search strategy.
For small businesses on a limited ad budget, this is an ideal way to save money, inform strategy, and improve search rankings.
Develop your analytical data pool
PPC and SEO will each provide their own analytics data to inform your ongoing digital marketing strategy. By combining the two, you will have access to a larger pool of analytical data.
In turn, this combination will help you make smarter decisions about your digital marketing efforts.
Integration of your E-commerce pages
Linking specific product pages through your PPC strategy can help you increase conversions. In fact, integrating ecommerce pages is one of the primary ways PPC can help increase sales.
Since SEO doesn’t allow you to target specific product pages as precisely, this feature is useful to complement your search strategy.
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