Most digital marketing strategies operate on a very siloed basis. Each channel that you use is a separate weapon in your arsenal of generating leads and sales and they never, or rarely, interact with rach other. This style of marketing is out of date. The truth is that marketing channels should be interacting, overlapping and feeding back into each other. Without this you won’t be able to maximise your returns from your marketing efforts. For digital marketing in particular this is a statement that should be the focus of any digital marketing strategy you develop, but especially so if you utilise SEO and PPC as channels for lead generation and sales.
Why does synergy matter for PPC and SEO?
More often than not businesses view PPC and SEO as an either / or scenario, but this is a very limited way of viewing the channels, as they are actually one channel, just accessed differently. Think about it, when a user searches for a key term, they see both the adverts and the organic results. Sometimes a user will click the ads, other times they won’t. The fact that users don’t consistently engage with each channel when making a search means that in order to maximise returns from Search engine marketing you need to be visible on both paid and organic sections of the search results.
Whilst everything described above is true, it’s also only a very basic way that you can synergise your SEO and PPc campaigns and have them work together. Some other ways you can do this include:
1) Use results from PPC and SEO campaigns to identify what the intent of key terms are so you can improve the page performance.
User intent is fast becoming one of the most important areas of digital marketing, as if your website and content doesn’t meet the expectations of the user then you aren’t going to succeed very much. This is especially true for SEO where meeting user intent is becoming a highly important factor in assessing where a web page ranks for a key term. Understanding the intent behind key terms you’re targeting though can be difficult sometimes though, but thankfully that’s where PPC can be of some help.
One of the biggest issues with SEO is the fact that it’s not 100% controllable. You’re reliant on search engines, and them crawling, ranking and showing your website in the results. This makes it hard to identify ways you can improve your performance without risking your overall rankings. PPC on the other hand is much more controllable and allows you to control messaging, landing pages and much more. By using your PPC to test messaging ideas, or landing page designs you can push traffic to pages in a way that you control, and from this you can develop a better understanding of what the users intent is, which you can then roll out across your SEO activity for pages.
2) PPC ads can help identify what messaging to put in your meta descriptions and meta titles.
A specific version of what was mentioned above is with meta descriptions and meta titles. These two elements are some of the most important ways that you can entice people to click onto your website from the organic search results, but unless you’re ranking for high volume key terms that have thousands of searches every month building up a sufficient amount of data to be able to know one way or another what’s working and what isn’t is basically impossible. By bidding on the key terms you’re trying to get ranking for you’ll be able to test out messages that can then be analysed and then implemented into your meta descriptions and meta titles.
3) Use your ads data to discover new SEO keywords and variants for you to target
Another way you can utilise PPC to help your SEO campaigns is to identify new key word variants that you can focus on. Google Ads will present reports to you that will show every term that has been searched that your ads have appeared for. If you’ve set up your campaigns to be be phrase or broad match then you’ll have a treasure trove of keyword data to go through. Not everything will be valuable, but you’ll find a few diamonds amongst the coal that you can pull out and then use as the basis for SEO activity and strategies.
This allows you to continually drive more organic traffic to your site over the long term rather than treating your SEO optimisation as a one and done style strategy.
For help on how to utilise your PPC and SEO campaigns to boost each others performance then please get in touch.