Why PPC and SEO Should Work Hand in Hand

When trying to compete in an increasingly competitive digital landscape, it’s tempting to go for the quick wins or succumb to “shiny object syndrome”. What’s the latest new app that everybody’s raving about? How can we hack the algorithm?

Digital marketing isn’t a get rich quick scheme – it’s a solid, long-term investment that will guarantee you real results providing you’re willing to put in the work. Two of the most enduring tools in your digital arsenal are pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimisation.

Are they the sexiest sounding tools? Probably not. But can they offer long-term return on investment, better brand awareness and higher customer value? Absolutely.

PPC and SEO Are Not in Competition

Let’s start by clearing something up. Many brand marketers may be deterred by the idea of investing in PPC and SEO at the same time. On the surface, these concerns may seem valid, for example:

• Both ultimately yield the same results – appearance in front of your target market on search engine results pages
• Both require us to research and play against our competitors to get the best results for our chosen keywords
• Both take time and money!

So, if we’re using a mixture of paid and organic to bolster our search engine marketing efforts, are we not essentially competing with ourselves? Would it not be better to invest in just one channel?

Let’s dispel that myth straight away. PPC and SEO are not in competition for the following reasons:

SEO is a long-term investment.

We all know that organic search rankings take between four months and a year to take effect, depending on the competitiveness of your chosen keywords, and the efforts you’ve put into your SEO. There’s no one-size-fits-all: even the demigods at the top of Google can’t tell you exactly how this ever-changing algorithm works.

PPC, by comparison, yields relatively quick results. Of course, there are no guarantees – you can’t just bid on a keyword and watch the customers come running. But provided you’ve ticked the boxes for the perfect ad, for example, increasing your quality score, writing punchy copy, bidding on the right keyword format and offering a useful landing page, you may rank faster.

You need to be prepared to try both – particularly if you’re a new company looking to become established.

SEO is about building trust.

PPC is an incredibly useful tool for determining which keywords your customers are searching for, and getting higher results in search engines when you’re still building your brand. But SEO makes you work harder for that privilege – and for good reason.

Google wants to provide its users with the most valuable content, not just that offered by the highest bidder. As such, there are a number of trust signals at play – for example, backlinks to your site, brand mentions on social media, reviews and links to and from credible sources. If you can appear organically as an authority on a certain subject, it shows you’ve done your homework.

That’s not to disparage the effectiveness of PPC, of course. PPC is perfect for when you’re brand building or bidding in an incredibly competitive industry. We all start somewhere, and it takes time to build that reputation.

PPC and SEO are completely different skillsets.

Pay-per-click advertising is not for the faint-hearted: there are exams you can take to become Google qualified, for example. To understand PPC, you need to have at the very least rudimentary knowledge of keyword types, such as broad match or exact match. 

Then there’s the deeper understanding of bidding strategies, impressions share, remarketing, and more. Conversely, SEO requires a broad spectrum of skillsets depending on your niche.

For example, if you’re a technical SEO, you might be more au fait with coding, indexing and optimising a site for page speed, whereas an on-site SEO specialist may be more focused on content. You can’t say that PPC and SEO are competing if they require completely different teams! 

What Is PPC?

So, let’s get down to the brass tacks of things. If you’re not sure where to invest your marketing budget, our explanation of pay-per-click and search engine optimisation will illustrate why you really shouldn’t scrimp on either.

PPC stands for pay-per-click advertising. We see it most commonly on search engines such as Google, but it’s also a paid model used on ad platforms such as Facebook Ads.

To see your ads appear in Google, you need to ‘bid’ on keywords – telling Google that you’re willing to pay up to X amount for your ad to appear when a user types in a certain query. The amount each keyword is worth will vary wildly depending on the industry, location, time of day, and the current quality of your site/campaigns.

When investing in pay-per-click advertising, you should have a rough idea of what it is your target market is going to be looking for, and therefore, what they will be typing into Google. (This will also form your SEO strategy, as we’ll outline below.)

Start with research

Just like any well-rounded marketing strategy, your pay-per-click advertising strategy should start with research. You should look at your competitors and your target audience, considering the pain points they have and the questions they may ask to solve their problems.

Using a tool like Google Keyword Planner, you can look at the search volumes for particular search queries, such as ‘how to X’. This will also give you an indication of how competitive that search term is – specifically, how many other people are bidding for it, how often it’s being searched, and how much it will cost to bid on it.

Plan your campaigns

Now you know what you are looking for, you need to be realistic with your budget. Remember, subject to some exceptions, your ads will cost money every time somebody clicks/taps them. As such, you should structure your campaigns accordingly.

Think of it in the same way you would structure your website, for example, ecommerce. You might have ‘men’s clothing’ as a campaign, then groups of ads within this campaign for specific products such as ‘men’s boots’. Then for each ad, you might use a variety of keywords based on the user’s transactional intent, for example, ‘men’s hiking boots’ or ‘men’s brown boots’.

Test, refine, go again!

Again, not for the faint-hearted, but there will be some degree of trial and error here. You may find your ads appearing for search terms that are nothing to do with the products you sell. A classic example that Google gives is searches for wine glasses rendering an ad for an eyeglasses retailer.

In this case, we turn to negative keywords. All you would need to do is add ‘wine’ as a negative keyword, which tells Google to exclude that term when showing your ad. Keep testing, change your bidding schedules and track which clicks lead to conversions. Rinse and repeat.

What Is SEO?

Have we scared you off yet? No? Good. The good news is that SEO does indeed take time, so there’s not the worry of your daily budget dwindling while you’re trying to figure out what went wrong. Search engine optimisation is essentially broken down into three parts:

1. On-site optimisation

This relates to all the content and the general structure/framework of your website. There are some overlaps with technical SEO, which we will cover below. When building your site, you need to consider your target keywords, and how you integrate them into the site architecture. For example:

• Have you added meta data and page titles to every page? (This is the data that displays when you type a search into Google. It should contain target keywords where possible.)
• Have you structured your website in a way that makes it easy for search engines to understand? For example, you may have a structure that starts with home, then a services category page, then a subcategory page for each service. You might know these as ‘child’ pages.
• Have you created blog content that answers users’ questions? Have you structured this content using headings that directly relate to search terms? More importantly, have you made sure you’ve avoided keyword stuffing by using natural wording?

Off-site optimisation

This concerns the effort you’re making to build your brand reputation. Essentially it involves what we call link building, which means other websites are linking to yours. When starting a link building strategy, make sure you consider:

• The relevance of the link. It is far better to get a trustworthy link, for example, from a newspaper article, than from somewhere that has no connection to your website. This is a common ‘black hat’ SEO technique – for example, gambling SEOs trying to shoehorn awkward links to slot machine websites on lifestyle blogs.
• The trust and citation flow. These are two metrics created by Majestic SEO which measure the trustworthiness of your backlinks. For example, links from scientific organisations are considered more trustworthy than somebody claiming to be an expert. 
• Other ways of building your brand reputation. You can also ask for user-generated content such as reviews, which can show up in your search results. Don’t forget to consider your social media profiles and use tools such as Google My Business to give you a physical presence. This will all contribute towards brand awareness, and the latter two are relatively quick wins!

Technical optimisation

This one’s the tricky one – or the most fun one if you’re so inclined! You’ll need a developer to make the technical changes on your site that will affect your SEO, while other issues are for those with precise search engine knowledge. For example:

• Have you submitted a sitemap to the search engines so that they can ‘crawl’ and index your site? Are there any issues that may be blocking search engines from being able to access your content properly?
• Have you applied relevant tagging where appropriate? For example, a recipe blog might use schema tagging to tag its content as ‘recipe’. This means that the search results will differ – rather than a standard text result, a recipe card will appear.
• Have you checked the site for broken pages? There is nothing more frustrating to users or search engines than those notorious 404 errors.
• Is your site fast and accessible enough? In 2021, the Google Page Experience update will rank sites higher if they have a good page experience. Make sure your site isn’t encumbered by large, server-hogging media files or annoying pop-ups.
• Is your site mobile-optimised? Google now uses ‘mobile first’ as a ranking factor, meaning that it’s more important that your site works well on a mobile.

So, now you’ve seen how much work there is to get your site to the top of Google. But how can you make SEO and PPC work together?

How SEO and PPC Can Work Together

Rather than competing against one another, SEO and PPC should complement each other to help you establish brand awareness and those all-important conversions faster.

Take the principles of both and apply them to your website content.

We return to the old adage that Google returns content that its users want. But what does that mean in practice? Consider how useful content will satisfy not only your users, but the search engines. For example:

Your quality score

Want to pay less for your pay-per-click ads? Of course you do. One way to do this is to increase your quality score – that way, your ads won’t have to work as hard to push up their ad rank. Quality score is affected by multiple factors including keywords and campaign structures, but it also depends on the landing page content.

Translation? Your landing page needs to match what you’re promising in the ad. So if your ad promises people ‘the secret to gym gains’, then the content needs to deliver! This includes keywords.

The Google answer box

The Google answer box is a great way to feature your content organically in position zero. A new feature even takes people to the precise section of the page for the question they asked.

But what if the rest of your content bears no relevance to the search query in question? If you’ve been lucky enough to hack the algorithm and still appear, chances are, your users are going to bounce.

Take the principles of both SEO and PPC and deliver useful content.

Use one to guide the other

Not sure where to start with targeting organic search terms? Use PPC to help you! We’ve already covered the benefits of Keyword Planner, but with PPC, you can measure clicks and conversion rates. That way you can see more than just search volume – you can test which kind of content serves your customers best.

Build awareness with PPC. Build trust with SEO.

It takes a long time to build trust with someone, but it’s easy to put an ad in front of them. PPC can deliver on the latter, but with SEO, you can back up your claims. Drive traffic to your site initially and then use backlinks to build your reputation.

With solid efforts, you could start to rank highly for the terms you’re bidding on, potentially saving you money on paid ads with organic results.

What Does This Mean for Your Business?

So, what’s the reward for all this hard work? By specifically targeting your target market’s chosen search terms, you’re demonstrating your value proposition and acquiring better quality traffic. Don’t believe us? Take it from the stats:

• 61% of marketers class SEO as their top priority
• 75% of digital marketers use link building in their strategy
• Effective SEO can improve conversions by 14%
• Users are 50% more likely to buy from a paid ad
• 41% of clicks go to the first three top ads
• Advertisers spend more than $100 billion on PPC per year.

For better brand awareness, conversions and business growth, your digital marketing strategy should contain both PPC and SEO. Not sure where to start? Contact The Growth Guys today.