The Advantages of Combining SEO with PPC

Are you debating between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising for your brand or business?

It can be difficult to understand how each channel works. However, before making a decision, it is critical to have a thorough grasp of the situation. However, there are advantages to combining SEO with PPC, which may provide you with the best of both worlds (and no need to choose one over the other).

Benefits of SEO and PPC: The Advantages of Working Together

SEO and PPC share the same goals of getting more qualified traffic to your website pages. Although they require different methodologies and strategies to be effective, the benefits of SEO and PPC, used simultaneously, can deliver excellent results.

1. Create Immediate Awareness with Long-Term Gain

PPC is a channel that can deliver results right away. Once you launch a paid advertising campaign, your ads can be served in moments — giving your brand or business immediate awareness and (hopefully) traffic. Because the results of SEO are not seen right away, PPC can fill the gap while you wait for your organic search initiatives to catch up.

2. Increased Visibility in Search Results

When using SEO and PPC together, one of the benefits is the opportunity to boost your brand’s visibility in search results. How does this work? If you optimize a website page for the keyword “CRM tools” and also target that same keyword with paid search ads, then your paid ad and your organic search result may show up at the same time — increasing your authority as well as chances of getting more traffic to your site.

3. Learn More About Your Audience

Using paid advertising gives you an opportunity to learn more about your targeted audience. What makes them click? Which images and text are most effective? With the data you collect around your PPC campaigns, you can apply it to your SEO work — improving your knowledge around search intent and consumer preferences to write more compelling copy based on search queries your audience is using.

4. Act on Time-Sensitive Content

Whether you have seasonal products or time-sensitive events like webinars or conferences, you may not have enough time for SEO to get you the visibility you need. That’s when you can call in PPC advertising to get in front of your audience right away. At the same time, you can optimize those pages for on-demand viewing at a later time.

5. Remarket to Traffic from Organic Search

Another benefit to using PPC and SEO together: using paid ads to remarket to traffic you brought in using SEO! Let’s say you have a website page that’s regularly in the position 1 spot in search results. You drive a ton of traffic to that site via organic search, and now you can remarket to those same visitors using PPC. Since these visitors will already be familiar with your brand or business from visiting your website, the remarketing ads can be quite effective at increasing conversions.

Getting Started with SEO and PPC

Now that you have an idea of the benefits of SEO and PPC, you may want to start developing strategies that co-exist. If you want to learn more about PPC first, here’s a starter on bringing pay per click into the digital marketing mix. If you are ready to embark on an SEO journey, here’s a great explainer of what SEO is and how it all works.