PPC & SEO: A Digital Marketer’s Toolkit

Do you work in digital marketing? If so, you better make sure your toolkit is fully packed with everything you need to compete in today’s connected marketplace. More specifically, you need to master PPC management and search engine optimization, including local SEO, so you can pull those arrows out of your quiver whenever you need them…which will be often.

An Explanation of PPC

Of course, it’s helpful to understand what pay per click ads and SEO are before you can feel comfortable adding them to your toolkit or quiver. When you use a PPC ad, you’ll pay the publisher or the owner of a website every time someone clicks on your advertisement.

With PPC ads, it’s possible to adjust your strategy and your individual ads instantly based on your ad’s performance. This ability makes PPC much more flexible than traditional forms of advertising, which often require you to wait weeks or months to gauge performance and don’t allow for changes once an ad is published.

You can launch PPC ads on platforms like Google Adwords. When you use Google Adwords, you can create text ads to earn an optimal position in the sponsored results section of Google’s search engine results pages.

A Look at Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the process of optimizing your webpages with the intent of attracting more traffic and higher quality visitors to your website through organic search results. In general, SEO specialists rely on using keywords and keyword phrases that closely resemble or match what searchers are using to look for information on the Internet in their online content. SEO experts also invest time in building quality backlinks from reputable sources to their websites.

Combining SEO and PPC

While SEO and PPC have a common goal – to attract more people to your website – they are different activities. Although that’s the case, there’s no reason why you can’t combine the two activities in an attempt to improve the overall results you get from your Internet marketing.

When your SEO and PPC work together instead of operating independently from each other, the combination can yield some meaningful results. Here are some of the possible results that SEO and PPC working together can produce:

• Increased traffic from both organic and paid sources
• A greater number of conversions
• Increased revenue
• Content that’s more relevant and meaningful to your customers and prospects
• Paid ads that are more accurately targeted toward your ideal clients

While those results are impressive in their own right, having your SEO team work side by side with your PPC management staff can provide even more meaningful benefits. These benefits include sharing information, collaboration and PPC ads on social sites that improve your SEO.

Information Sharing

When you separate your SEO and PPC activities, it often prevents your teams from sharing valuable information with each other. And that’s a shame because your teams could exchange information that would enable your PPC ads to inform your search engine optimization activities.

If you consult with an SEO company, you’ll probably learn that it will take a while for you to see significant results from your SEO efforts. While you have to be patient when it comes to SEO, you don’t have to sit back and wait for results from your PPC campaigns.

PPC platforms provide immediate feedback on the performance of your advertisements in real-time. You can tell how effective your PPC ads are and learn which keywords are motivating people to take the actions you want them to take. You can also make instant changes to your pay per click ads based on the feedback you review.

The instant feedback you can get from a PPC ad can prove to be invaluable as it relates to your search engine optimization and the success of your online marketing overall. That is, it can be invaluable if your SEO and PPC teams work together and share information.

By having your SEO join forces with your PPC, you’re enabling your pay per click experts to share information about the keywords the members of your target audience are currently responding to the best. Your SEO staff and content writers can use this information to improve your content by sprinkling those keywords throughout your published material. Doing so will make your content more relevant and meaningful to the people who consume it, and “relevant” and “meaningful” are two words you always want to have associated with your material.

Collaboration

When your SEO and PPC are combined, it allows your teams to do more than share information. It enables them to collaborate. This can be very important to the success of your digital marketing campaigns.

One thing you may want your departments to collaborate on is the identification of keywords and keyword phrases. Teamwork in this context can be very effective because your SEO department and your PPC team use keywords at different points of the buying journey. When your departments collaborate on keywords and phrases, they can identify the ones that will be appropriate throughout the buying process.

As a general guideline, SEO employs keywords closer to the beginning of the purchasing process, around the time that a person is at the start of the process or just beyond. PPC, on the other hand, uses keywords and phrases to attract consumers who are much further along in the buying process and closer to actually purchasing something.

Improved SEO as a Result of PPC Social Media Ads

As you know, Google Adwords isn’t the only platform where you can use pay per click ads. You can also pay to have your ads displayed on social media sites, such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Social platforms allow you to target very specific groups of consumers with your PPC ads. Because you can target groups so precisely with PPC ads on social media sites, the results these ads can produce can provide incredible insights into your target audience which can be used to inform and improve your SEO. As the ability to target groups becomes even more refined moving forward, PPC ads on social sites will benefit SEO even more.

PPC & SEO Services by GoingClear

If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency that offers PPC and SEO services, you’ve found what you’ve been searching for in GoingClear. We’re PPC and SEO experts who have a full toolkit of tools, techniques and strategies that can take your search engine optimization and pay per click efforts to the next level of success individually and together. Contact us to learn more now!