PPC Smart Search Marketing: Using the Combination of PPC & SEO

SEO and PPC can work as standalone advertising channels with unique roles and challenges. At the same time, both of these offshoots of Internet marketing have a common goal – to attract new users to your site.

Faced with financial constraints and a budget that prevents two full-fledged campaigns from being deployed, marketers often decide to combine these approaches or use only one of them. You may ask which option is more financially advantageous.

In fact, you don’t have to choose between SEO and PPC. Even with a tight budget, you can benefit from both practices. It is only necessary to set priorities correctly and carefully draw up an integrated marketing strategy.

Below, I’ll give some useful tips and tricks to help you take a fresh look at PPC and SEO, as well as effectively combine them to increase traffic.

Find new applications for old SEO tools

Some marketers consider the keywords with the “long tail” of the gold mine, while others – frankly outdated technique. No matter what type of specialist you are, detailed queries will help you identify the minus-words that inhibit your PPC campaign.

For example, people looking for information on request will not see your ads entitled “buy a birthday greeting card” because of irrelevant minus-words.

Identifying and eliminating minus-words is a very useful practice. Using it from time to time, you will save users from useless content and stop overpaying for unnecessary clicks.

Use PPC data effectively

Notice the text of the ads working particularly well. Adjust it to SEO requirements to get the most out of it. For example, introduce the best PPC keys to the meta tags on your site. Also use the themes of the most clickable ads to write blog articles and drive organic traffic.

Focus on keywords

Using keyword data collected during a PPC campaign to develop an effective SEO strategy is not a new concept. However, this tactic deserves to be mentioned.

PPC ad analysis is a reliable and proven way to evaluate keywords. Marketers clearly see what requests were found by users and prompted them to move to the site. This information makes it much easier to create a competitive SEO strategy.

Some sites don’t use pay-per-click ads in principle and focus their best on SEO. In this case, when they finally decide to run a PPC campaign, a list of working keywords is already at hand.

It’s never too late to combine SEO and PPC to improve the visibility of your site. However, their parallel implementation is the most effective approach.

Return users to the site

Even if your SEO efforts have brought some bang for your buck and raised your site’s ranking in search, don’t rush to celebrate. For various reasons, potential customers can dramatically change their preferences and leave the site. For example, they may want to compare your prices with those of competitors. If they find something tempting elsewhere, it won’t be easy to get them back.

Unobtrusively hold your visitors and keep their interest with remarketing.

The average Internet user spends about 5 hours a week on online purchases. Most visitors probably won’t remember your site after a single visit.

To encourage them to return, find out what products they were interested in, and show the advertisements for these items after a while. This technique will serve as a useful reminder and a good opportunity to establish a long dialogue with new customers. It’s much easier for a user to click on an ad in a browser than to re-search for a product seen a week ago.

Combine SEO and PPC, encouraging visitors to return to your site and complete purchases. While timely pop-up ads can attract traffic to your site, a top-notch user experience and useful content will turn guests into active shoppers.

Build your online image with both PPC and SEO in mind

Pay-per-click ads can be used more than just to promote products and services. Be creative and prepare effective PPC ads for blog articles to attract interested users to the site. Online travel that begin with with information collection often ends in large purchases.

Don’t worry if users skip your ads and go to competitors’ sites at first. It is important to stay in sight at all time. Ultimately, more and more people will click on your ads because the name of your brand will become recognizable and they will want to get to know it better.

Remember the following principles:

• The more often your company flashes in search results on relevant key queries, the better.
• The information in the ads should be concise, useful and intriguing.
• Give a clear definition of the product and list the benefits that the customer will receive by buying it (discounts, gifts, bonuses, etc.).
• The quality of the page that the user sees after clicking on the link is also crucial.
• Make sure your content is relevant and contains compelling calls to action that give you a boost to your targets (registration, shopping, ordering, etc.)

When potential customers stumble upon attractive offers, they go to the site for detailed descriptions. Don’t disappoint them.

Be careful with bold marketing decisions

Not every creative combination of PPC and SEO will be successful. Let’s look at a good example.

The 2010 oil crisis in the Persian Gulf was a difficult time for BP (British Petroleum). In an attempt to fix the company’s reputation, marketers have launched a special PPC ad.

Every time someone searched Google for information on request, the first thing that came up was a paid BP ad. The idea was to make the culprit of the environmental disaster look like a caring and decent company.

However, many were disappointed that the BP administration was spending a lot of money on advertising instead of dealing with a real problem. Critics accused the company of pushing its link to the top of the search to divert attention from defamatory content (news, reviews, environmental reports, etc.).

The lesson is that an original PPC campaign to increase brand awareness and restore your reputation may be a good idea, but it is important to carefully analyze the potential public response before launching it.

Summary

Some marketers still consider SEO and PPC separate disciplines. This is especially evident among start-ups and small businesses who tend to spell out targets.

This article was written to demonstrate the effectiveness of well-designed SEO and PPC combinations.

At the same time conducting organic and advertising campaigns, you can get more data for analysis, dig deeper and discover unexpected details about your target audience, use this information to improve SEO and PPC approaches both in tandem and separately.

Keep in mind that both SEO and PPC are constantly adapting to changes in Google’s algorithms. This is how they help the sites meet the new requirements and maintain high positions in the search engine.

So stay tuned for the most significant changes and don’t forget to update your SEO and PPC strategies regularly.