The SEO PPC Balancing Act

Finding balance in all walks of life is important. Work/life balance. A balanced diet. Balance when riding a bike. Balance is important. Without it, you fall down. Even in our world, balance is key, especially when it comes to SEO and PPC.

Both SEO and PPC are hugely important - well we would say that right?! But stay with us here.?

SEO helps brands take market share away from competitors by ranking them higher in searches. Meanwhile, PPC ads ensure rapid growth plus fast results by placing marketing messages in front of customers at the right time.

Now that’s the basics sorted - how do we ensure that perfect yin and yang? Truth is you can't, but SEO and PPC can and should work together because they support a business’s goals in different ways. But it takes work.

Work that includes planning, strategic knowledge and, most importantly, a clear mission to find the efficiencies in both SEO and PPC before deciding how to balance the two.

Let’s start with PPC.

We believe in using human strategic guidance alongside machine automation - a strategy that benefits from intuition and oversight without bias while delivering granular daily optimisations at scale.

Wasted ad spend is therefore kept at a minimum and enables humans (that’s us!) to steer campaigns based on business goals. That means these PPC campaigns are tightly run, well-oiled machines. Nice!

Further refinements can also be made with ad copy tweaks, testing different bid strategies, and using dynamic search ads to fill gaps in coverage and maximise volume.??

The point is, that it is important to find these optimisations before attempting to balance it with SEO.?

Organic search is still the most cost-effective way to take market share away from a competitor. Yet, as an industry, we tend to look backwards for the insights to guide this strategy.?

Risky game this, as you could be missing new trends and behaviours, particularly in a world that is increasingly unpredictable.

So let’s shift our perceptions of SEO and see it not just about being reactive, but to also use it as a predictive tool to spot future trends and create content sooner so that a business can earn high rankings later.

To achieve this means using real time data and performance tools to anticipate consumer search behaviour, rather than optimise by reacting to past data.

For example, by taking consumer insights via a digital demand tracker and a share of search tool (I wonder who can help with that…) it’s possible to use that data to support a broader digital strategy alongside performance KPIs. This will subsequently feed into digital PR, content and technical SEO.

What you are effectively doing is giving your team a specific set of tools to maximise effectiveness in search, performance, merchandising and buying; and lastly, by creating a new growth engine that ensures SEO is seen as key investment channel and not just a hygiene factor.

Ultimately by getting the balance between SEO and PPC will mean you are avoiding cannibalisation, wastage and unnecessary costs.?

This is essential, because one of the problems most businesses encounter is finding enough budget to simultaneously invest heavily in both.?

In our experience most brands today split SEO and PPC around 40:60. That obviously changes at different times of the year (Black Friday, Christmas etc).

However, real balance will be struck by getting your SEO and paid media teams understanding that they are on the same side. It all ends up on the same search engine result page afterall. It’s not one or the other.?

You are allowed to be friends guys…