The Digital Blend
The Digital world is definitely a large market place that cannot be ignored, especially if you have your business online. Digital Marketing is an essential investment to reach and appeal to consumers. Websites are still the mainstay of having a digital presence and seen as essential in promoting your business online. It’s important to see investment in websites as the second highest priority of your digital marketing.
Despite the many benefits Internet has to offer, it also poses a quite different challenge. The easy access that Internet provides also gives you as much competition as you can imagine. Having a website is not enough to make your business stand out, run and able to compete. As a Business you need to be able to give alternative way for online community to access your website at any time possible. If you want business growth you need to be exposed, to be known and visible. Your Website needs to be frequently targeted by consumers.
Investing in Digital Marketing is very important to any kind of business. When it comes to the website, two strategies can be adopted to maximize returns: SEO & PPC.
There is a long running debate about PPC and SEO. A lot of businesses find themselves asking the same question of which strategy to use, which one will give them the biggest return on investment.
The answer is……BOTH Digital Marketing Strategies are strong forces on their own and when they are paired together, the two strategies make the PERFECT RECIPE FOR DIGITAL MARKETING SUCCESS!!!
Some of the benefits of applying a holistic approach of PPC and SEO to your digital marketing strategy are listed below.
But First…………let’s talk about what are these strategies and how they work.
PPC & SEO together make it the perfect Digital Marketing recipe!!
WHAT IS SEO??
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it’s the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.
Let’s make it simpler……………….
When it comes to SEO, there’s you, the search engine and the searcher.
If you have an article about Cyprus Golf Resorts, you want the search engine to show it as a top result to anyone who searches for the phrase ‘Cyprus Golf Resorts’.
SEO is the magic you have to work on your article in order to make Google very likely to include your post as one of the top results whenever someone searches for that keyword.
With this marketing strategy, the goal is to obtain traffic to your website through organic listings. These listings can be found beneath the PPC ads within the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
There are numerous SEO efforts, but whether you are altering your Meta Description Tag behind the scenes or cultivating blog posts around keywords that you want your company to organically rank for on Google, this is a slower more long-term strategy.
In SEO there is no need to pay for clicks, although it requires you to spend time doing research to get a favorable combination of ads and target audience.
WHAT IS PPC??
PPC stands for Pay Per Click. It’s an online advertising model in which advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their online ads. These are sponsored listings that you see whenever you make a search. There is a charge whenever a visitor clicks on any of your ads.
With this kind of advertising you can still control your campaign as you get to create your own ad. You can also manage the target audience and still stay within the budget.
PPC can be found at the top of the SERP. PPC advertising is all about bidding for the top position on SERP and listings. You can do this by buying or bidding on keyword phrases that are relevant to their products and services. The higher the bid, the higher the spot on the search results the more people will find your ad to go to your website.
Now that you got the idea of how these two strategies work, let’s talk about reasons of having them both in place. It’s your best interest to engage simultaneously in SEO and PPC efforts as they complement each other so well.
CREATE A COHESIVE KEYWORD STRATEGY
We have all been there asking the same questions:
- So how do you decide which keywords to choose?
- Or which keywords are performing better?
Well you can see what’s performing best from the PPC efforts and then plug those into your SEO efforts. The SEO strategy isn’t quite complete without PPC. Since there is a lot of back-end work that will be performed on your site in order to increase SEO rankings, you want to make sure the keywords in your strategy will be worth the time and effort.
SEO is a great way to target keywords that may otherwise eat up your PPC budget.
For example, if you sell computer equipment you might want to up your organic search rank for laptops, but discover through your AdWords PPC campaign that there is more interest for tablets. In this case you could direct your SEO efforts to improve your organic rank for laptops more heavily than tablets.
On the other site you can use PPC to target keywords that are not yet ranking organically.
IMPROVE LANDING PAGES OPTIMIZATION
It is a fact that both SEO and PPC rely heavily on the quality of a website’s landing pages. While optimizing the website to adhere to SEO best practices, your PPC ad’s quality score will benefit as well. Quality Score is Google’s important rating of the quality and relevance of your landing page, keywords and PPC ads. The on-site optimizations made from SEO campaign will allow you to incorporate keywords you may be bidding on in your PPC campaigns. Improving the landing page, will improve the PPC performance.
– Will increase your quality score
– Higher your ad position on Google
– Lower the cost of your clicks
– Lead to higher convertion rate
– Lower bounce rate on your site
USE PPC TO DICTATE META DESCRIPTIONS
Some PPC ads will produce results while others won’t perform as well. That’s ok! Don’t panic!!! It’s normal!
Once the converting ads are identified, the SEO strategy is strengthened. For example, a high converting PPC ad’s headline can be implemented in the form of an SEO title tag. Additionally, the description line of a high converting PPC ad can also be used for an SEO meta description.
Meta description tags are added to the back-end section of a webpage telling a search engine what that specific page is about. Using the right keyword in the Meta Descriptions tags will increase your organic search rankings and is a component of SEO. But which keywords should you use when there are just as so many ways to say something?
This is when PPC comes in handy….
By using your best performing PPC keywords as a staring point for your Meta Description Tags and you will be using the keyword phrases that are most often used by the people actually searching for your product or service.
RE-ENGAGE USERS WHO DID NOT CONVERT
Having both PPC and SEO run simultaneously helps ensure you reach your target audience throughout the different stages of the customer journey. For example, if a user finds your business organically the first time and does not convert, you can re-engage the user through a PPC re-marketing campaign. Implement a remarketing campaign is a great way to bring back that hard-earned traffic in hopes of converting them the second time around.
INCREASE VISIBILITY ON THE SERP
One of the most important benefits to combining paid and organic efforts is added exposure on the search engine result page.
Dominating the SERP can be greatly improve your overall online marketing performance. Having a marketing strategy in place that includes both PPC and SEO means that your target audience will see your brand twice. This will provide extra credibility to the users when they look for when searching online.
As mentioned, SEO is a long-term investment and should be viewed as a marathon whereas PPC results are instant. When these two strategies are put together will ensure that while you are improving your organic rankings, your brand is still present to your target audience through paid ads.
INCREASE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA VISIBILITY
With social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, the PPC can create ads that target incredibly specific groups. The results of these campaigns contain valuable data about key demographics for your product, which the SEO team can then use in turn to write new content and refine SEO strategy.
As ad technology improves the synergy PPC and SEO will only grow and targeting will get even more specific with machine learning and artificial intelligence tools.
Using these two strategies together you will only win…..
– Improve CTR
– Improve keyword quality score
– Improve organic ranking
– Increase ROI
– Find the right keywords to reach the right audience at the right time
– Lower your bounce rate
If you are wondering which strategy to use PPC or SEO is better for your business to consider all the above for a comprehensive approach.
SEO and PPC are like Peanut Butter and Jelly…Whether you are pairing the two on crackers you can never go wrong with this delicious sandwich.
But when you run out of one or the other and have to settle for just the jelly, this is a good choice but still is not as great as peanut butter and jelly together!!!
Seriously PPC can offer some excellent, rapid insights into search and user intent and is a great way to demonstrate actual monetary value to a client. This make it the perfect match to SEO’s longer term and high organic value nature.
