30 second recap:
- While it is clear that SEO and PPC are great tools, these two disciplines work in silos
- In fact, these teams and channels mostly work alone in silos and are often managed separately
- Accenture Song SEO Manager Michael McManus explains how companies can combine paid and organic SEO to function as one value-add unit
SEO and PPC are a must in your arsenal when planning your marketing strategy. Depending on what they are looking to do, most businesses tend to choose one over the other, if they are looking to increase their rankings and get traffic from organic search then they will go with SEO, while PPC will focuses on getting instant “paid” traffic from areas such as search, social, and display.
Both SEO and PPC are great tools to increase the authority of your site/brand and help generate more traffic and sales for your business. But these two teams/channels tend to work alone in silos and are often managed separately.
Now, while both of these options can and do work well on their own, getting both teams to work together can be a powerful strategy for any business. Instead of working apart and potentially fighting over budget, time, resources and rankings. By bringing both departments together so they can collaborate and work in unison, they will benefit from diverse insights and learnings that they might not otherwise gain on their own. These insights will enable them to produce stunning results in both campaigns.
These two marketing channels aren’t meant to operate independently, yet they do so almost every time. But instead of looking at both channels as separate entities and putting them together, you’ll see that they can help you get better results across the board rather than just having them work on their own.
The data and insights you can get from PPC campaigns are extremely in-depth and powerful. When you take that data and combine it with your SEO strategies, it will provide you with insights you can use to create content that will make a big difference to your organic search traffic.
Balancing organic and paid search strategies for optimal success is a key challenge, and many businesses have to catch up as they typically use only one of these strategies.
How SEO and PPC can work together to boost your business
Along with the vast amounts of keyword and conversion information that SEO can use when working with PPC, another huge benefit businesses can gain when they combine SEO and PPC is the potential to consume a large portion of the SERPs, where they can show ads in the top of the page while owning the organic listings below.
This is something that should not be overlooked as it gives you more chances to capture the user, who may be looking for your brand or something your brand has to offer. For example, let’s say you’re running PPC and SEO campaigns separately and a user does a search and your ad shows up, but skips it and goes straight to the organic listings but you don’t show up for that particular search, you’re potentially missing out. to catch that user.
So now if you’re using both PPC and SEO together and using your PPC data to gather insights into what users were and are searching for, where your ads are appearing, but not your organic listings. You can then take that data and start building great content for those terms and optimize your site for that stage of the user journey. You can now potentially see your site’s PPC ads at the top of the page, and your site appears below those ads in the organic results. This means that if a searcher were to skip your listing and go straight to the organic results, your site would also be listed there, earning you greater brand discovery.
Bringing both PPC and SEO together and working side-by-side and taking over the SERPs for a particular keyword will not only allow you to get more exposure than you would if you were using SEO or PPC alone, but now you will also increase the visibility of your site and the chances that a user will click on your site.
Another added benefit of combining SEO and PPC and capturing the SERPS is that users, searchers, and prospects are more likely to see value and trust in a well-represented brand in the SERPs.
If you were able to help guide and encourage users to click through to your site, wouldn’t that be an effort worth implementing?
Make SEO and PPC work for you
Well, you may be wondering “ok well now I know I need SEO and PPC to work together, how do I go about it?”
Here are some practical tips for making SEO and PPC work together.
Keyword
Keywords are important to both SEO and PPC as each relies on them to help create the appropriate content for each strategy. Both will want to target appropriate and relevant keywords to appear in the SERPs when a user searches for information, makes a purchase, searches for a brand, etc.
Using keyword data and insights from your PPC campaigns and providing that information to your SEO team will allow them to create the content a user is looking for and thus be customer facing throughout their journey.
Ad creation
Paid social media ads and retargeting ads are a great way to share your content across different platforms that will help you gain backlinks that will help your site content rank organically. While this is happening, you can create retargeting ads that will help you grab users’ attention once they leave your site.
PPC data
As we mentioned earlier, PPC campaign data contains a myriad of information that you can use to create highly targeted content and get your site pages to rank organically. From your PPC campaigns, you’ll be able to see things like keyword research data, impressions, CTRs, and so much more.
This will allow you to better optimize your site content and create content that may be missing, as well as help create highly targeted and optimized page titles and descriptions.
Conclusion
It’s not about SEO vs PPC anymore, or at least it shouldn’t be after reading this article. Now that you’re aware of the potential benefits of combining your PPC and SEO efforts, it’s time to go out and implement this new strategy.
Armed with all the data you have at your fingertips from your PPC campaigns, use this new data and insights to help you craft better SEO strategies, which will give you a competitive edge and help you reach your customers at every stage of their journey. .
It’s time to stop treating SEO and PPC as silos and it’s time to bring them together so your site can benefit from the added data and insights so your site can dominate the SERPs.
Remember that SEO and PPC are each other’s more powerful tools.
Michael McManus is SEO Manager at Accenture Song. Michael has hands-on experience in branding strategies, website structure/architecture and development, SEO strategies and online marketing campaigns.
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