5 Benefits of Using SEO and PPC Together

SEO and PPC are often approached as completely separate marketing strategies. Whilst there are many differences between them, they both fall into the category of Search marketing. There are so many ways that they can complement each other to improve results, provide learnings and use data more effectively.

Taking a more co-ordinated and integrated approach using SEO and PPC alongside each other opens up so many opportunities to improve your search marketing strategy. Why rely on just one strategy, when you can take advantage of the benefits that combining them brings?

With that said, here are five top benefits of combining your SEO and PPC efforts.

#1 Increased visibility & exposure on the SERP

One of the biggest benefits of combining your SEO & PPC efforts is added exposure on the results page.

It’s important to remember that the top 2-3 results are paid ads. Thus meaning, even if you’re ranking 1st for a keyword organically, your competitors could still be in the top position on the results page with an Ad.

By using PPC alongside your SEO efforts, you have the ability to dominate both the organic and paid results, resulting in increased traffic, whilst also showing an established online presence.

By using PPC ads alongside their SEO strategy, Moonpig has been able to dominate the search results page. They now place in the top position for both paid and organic results.

Even if your ad isn’t clicked on, its presence on the page will help potential customers see you as a trusted and established company. Use both SEO and PPC to take up as much space on the SERP as possible. This will leave less space for your competitors to be seen.

#2 Bring organic visitors back to your site through PPC Ads

Creating PPC campaigns targeting users who visited your site organically, but didn’t convert can encourage return visits.

Implementing a remarketing campaign that delivers a compelling message to users at the right time, allows consumers to pick up where they left off. Create tailored ad copy to remind them of the purchase they didn’t complete or offer them a discount or freebie. In effect, you’re incentivising this traffic back to your site and increasing the likelihood of them converting.

Vodafone’s use of a remarketing PPC campaign is pretty effective. Offering ’24 months free Spotify Premium’ to someone who has already visited the site organically is much more likely to bring back those users who left and turn this traffic into conversions.

#3 Learn from PPC Ad Copy to Inform Organic Strategy

Taking learnings from top performing PPC ad copy can help inform your SEO strategy. Using data from PPC campaigns, you can determine what messaging resonates with users and drives the most traffic to your site resulting in prompt conversions.

You get a good idea of what copy to use for meta descriptions, title tags and on-page content in your organic search efforts. As you already know that the messaging works, it can be optimised and adapted to use for an SEO strategy.

Organically testing titles and meta descriptions can be a long process. By testing these attributes using PPC ad copy data, you’ll have the benefit of almost immediate results, that you can quickly put into practice.

#4 Testing & Sharing Keyword Data

By running SEO and PPC campaigns alongside each other, you have twice as much keyword data to analyse. So, use this to your advantage.

Running PPC ads is a great way to test, refine and inform your organic keyword strategy. Targeting keywords you want to rank for organically with a PPC campaign helps you analyse whether it’s worthwhile to put in the SEO efforts. Gather immediate results from your PPC ads on click-through and conversion rates delivered. Then, use these to determine whether the keywords you’re after will be effective if optimised for organically.

Use PPC to target competitive organic keywords. It can be very time consuming and take months of work to rank organically for a competitive keyword. If you’re struggling to rank organically on page one for a keyword, try targeting the keyword through a PPC campaign. Whilst you wait for your organic rankings to increase, PPC has the advantage of almost immediate results, helping to quickly achieve visibility and drive traffic.

Similarly, SEO can be used to target expensive PPC keywords. A big drawback of pay-per-click advertising is that it can be expensive, and targeting some keywords is just not cost-effective. This is where SEO can help out. Put your SEO efforts towards optimising your site to rank for terms that are out of your reach with PPC.

#5 Brand SERP Dominance

If you already rank 1st for your brand term, it can seem pointless or even counter-productive to bid on brand terms in a PPC campaign. Why would you pay for clicks from ads when your brand terms are already performing well?

Bidding on your brand terms allows you to protect your brand name. It gives you more control over the results page. In effect, you take up more space to push out competitors trying to bid on your brand – which happens often!

For the brand term ‘compare the market’, big competitors like Confused.com and Moneysupermarket also show paid search ads. This means that they’re bidding on Compare The Market’s brand terms.

By showing a paid ad and an organic listing in top positions, Compare The Market has a greater brand presence. This allows them to dominate the search results.

Summary

As you can see, there are so many advantages of taking a more holistic approach to your search marketing. Although very different, PPC and SEO can really bring added search success when implemented alongside each other.

Getting the most out of both your SEO and PPC campaigns just takes a bit of careful planning and expertise. Though hopefully, you’re now on your way to implementing a successful combined search marketing strategy, using our helpful tips.