5 Ways to Use Pay Per Click & Organic SEO Together

There’s some debate in the online marketing world as to which is more effective – organic SEO or pay per click (PPC) advertising. SEO often provides greater traffic. PPC takes less time and energy. SEO doesn’t depend on a daily ad spend. PPC is faster to see results. So which one is better?

It isn’t really about which is better – it’s about using them in the most effective way to make the most of every marketing dollar. Here are 5 ways you can use PPC and SEO together to get the best results:

1. Identify new opportunities for organic campaigns. You can cast a wide net with PPC advertising and see which terms perform well for your business. For example, one of our clients sells HDPE Pipe and other underground utility supplies. Although it wasn’t one of our original focus keywords for our organic campaign, it was one of the best performing paid terms for traffic and conversions. Now it’s part of our focus keywords and once organic visibility increases, we may be able to scale back on paying for that term.
2. Fill in the gaps on highly competitive terms. We all have our lists of keywords we want organic rankings for, and that’s great. The problem comes when the competition level is so high that we can’t justify the amount of time and effort it will take to get that organic ranking. PPC gives us another way to get traffic for that competitive keyword without all the work that organic involves. It’s critical to measure ROI, however: we don’t want to pay more for clicks than we can generate in profit.
3. Introduce new products. Organic traffic is great, but it can take the search engines days or weeks to index and rank our newest products. When we have a new, hot item, we can use PPC to get that initial traffic until organic positioning catches up.
4. Address seasonality. The industrial marketplace doesn’t always follow the standard holiday trends that B2C retailers do. There are still seasonal trends for some industries. For example, another client sells commercial pressure washers. Spring and summer, when there is a lot more outside cleaning to be done, are much busier than fall and winter. By allocating their PPC budget for pressure washer terms during this peak season, we can catch more of those searchers who are ready to buy.
5. Test landing pages. When redesigning landing pages or adding new product copy, it’s important to test how effective those changes are. The problem is when we don’t have high enough traffic levels to get statistically significant results in a short time. We can use PPC to send a relatively large amount of traffic in a short time. Now we don’t have to wait as long to check bounce rates and conversion rates to see if our changes have positive impact.

How are you using PPC and SEO in your online marketing?

Share this: