Small businesses that want to achieve immediate Web success often look to PPC as the solution.
While PPC can drive leads to your doorstep right away, that doesn’t tell the whole story. On the contrary: PPC, while powerful, isn’t the ideal tool for all businesses to meet their goals.
To really unlock its power, PPC should be coupled with an ongoing SEO strategy.
SEO helps brands to access an ongoing (and ever-growing) flow of traffic by raising the visibility of your site in search engines. Over time, you can develop and promote traffic that effectively gains higher rankings for a greater variety of relevant search queries.
When you conclude your PPC campaign, it’s over: You won’t get any more use from it unless you invest more money in future ads. On the other hand, SEO continues to add value over time.
By developing and publishing SEO-friendly content, you’re continuing to build your presence at all times. Then you can amplify those efforts with targeted PPC campaigns.
How Do SEO and PPC Work Together?
Instead of rushing directly into PPC, most businesses should start with a strong base of SEO-friendly content and then move into paid traffic when the sales funnel is firmly established.
In the long run, however, it’s best to have traffic from both sources.
SEO and PPC can complement each other in many ways:
SEO and PPC Achieve Better Search Engine Presence
Purchasing PPC ads for the same keywords your SEO is targeting makes you far more likely to appear “above the fold” on a user’s display – that is, to be visible without scrolling. Over time, consistent exposure to your brand helps encourage engagement.
PPC Helps You Recover Missed Organic Search Clicks
Even if your brand ranks #1 for a search term, PPC can still boost your clicks. Studies have shown that when ads are paused, the traffic those ads would have created is not consistently replaced by organic search traffic, even when organic rankings are favorable.
PPC Empowers You With Remarketing Opportunities
Remarketing is an ad strategy that focuses on capturing clicks from users who have interacted with your site in the past but failed to convert. This is especially useful when you are trying to get attention from users who abandoned a shopping cart.
PPC Helps You Test Out Strategies for Long-Term SEO
PPC gives you the opportunity to test the viability of new keywords for your long-term strategy. Using the data you capture from your PPC campaigns, you can determine whether interest and engagement are sufficient to emphasize SEO for a certain keyword.
Very few brands can reach their full potential with SEO or PPC alone. Synthesizing the two creates amazing new opportunities.