Find Out Why Pay Per Click Goes Hand in Hand With SEO

As a business owner, you want to be sure that your internet marketing campaign is working at its best. Before you commit your budget to a strategy, you want to be sure that all the elements are working together effectively. One question many people ask is whether you need both SEO and PPC.

At first glance, pay per click advertising and SEO might seem completely independent of each other. One is an advertising channel while the other is used to create visibility on search engines. Google has stated that PPC does not affect search engine rankings; however, they do help each other. If you’re trying to get traffic to your website, you have to understand how these two traffic-driving channels are interrelated.

What is SEO?

The acronym stands for search engine optimization, which means it improves your website’s performance with search engines like Google and Bing. More specifically, you want your website to place at the top of a search page when someone searches for something relevant to your site’s topic or industry. SEO encompasses all the best practices and techniques that improve your site’s authority and relevance on a given topic or keyword search.

What is PPC?

Pay per click ads, abbreviated PPC, are a type of ad that charges you only when someone clicks on it. This is provided by major search engines, including Google and Bing. When you set up a campaign, the ads are displayed at the top of search results as “sponsored” links or on websites that participate in the ad network. This type of advertising is a very effective way for businesses that are establishing a presence on the internet to drive initial traffic to their website.

How are they related?

They both help drive traffic to your website, but in very different ways. SEO builds up a website’s authority and presence over time so that the search engine will rank it higher when people are searching within a relevant topic. It can take several months or over a year to start pulling in a lot of traffic from search engine queries. Pay per click, on the other hand, can drive big traffic to your site from day one, but it can also cost quite a bit of money, depending on how competitive the targeted keywords are.

How do they help each other?

Although Google and Yahoo have stated that paying for ads is not a factor that they use to rank your website or improve your placement in search results, these two types of marketing do help each other in a number of ways. Read on to discover how marketing professionals use these strategies hand in hand.

Decreased ad costs

When one of your ads is displayed, it means you have enabled your campaign to automatically place a high enough payment to beat out someone who is competing for the same keyword or phrase. It’s similar to placing a bid at an auction. The winner of the auction gets their ad displayed higher, while the lower bidder’s ad would either be placed at a lower position or not at all.

How do you get a lower ad cost? Search engine optimization improves the quality score of your landing page in the eyes of the search engine’s algorithm. This results in a lower cost needed for your campaign to win the ad bidding process. Lower ad cost means your ads will get displayed more often, and you’ll get more visitors to your site.

Higher presence on search engine result pages (SERPs)

One of the main goals for internet marketing is to gain the top spot in the search engine results, but you have to remember that the ads are placed above the organic results. Therefore, with ads located above the organic results, your company will appear more prominently to searchers. This not only drives more traffic to your site, but it also enhances your brand image.

Improved keyword research

Keywords are the main focus of your online marketing efforts. Your marketing team is always looking for top performing words and natural language phrases that people use when searching for your product or service. The ad services offered by Google and Yahoo both include tools that allow your marketing team to see what keywords your competitors are targeting and how much traffic these words and phrases are bringing in.

With the information provided by these tools, your marketing team can place better keywords on landing pages, which improves relevance to user search queries. In this way, the keyword research and content marketing efforts work together in a synergistic way to bring in more traffic.

The mobile search factor

Most people are surfing the internet via mobile devices, which have a much smaller viewing area than laptops or desktop computers. This means your site’s visibility at the top of the SERPs page is even more important. If you were to rely solely on search engine optimization to gain organic traffic, you could be at a disadvantage. Ads place higher on the page than organic results and are more visible to users on mobile devices. This is another reason why it’s advantageous to use paid advertising with Google AdWords and Bing Ads along with search optimization.

Ads give test data for search engine marketing

It takes a while for your presence to grow on search engines, so it’s important to use pay per click advertising to figure out the best keyword strategy for your website content. By using various keywords and phrases with ad campaigns, your marketing team will gain insights about keyword strategy and customer behavior. They’ll be able to see which keywords drive the most traffic and how those customers behave on your site. With this information, your team can adjust the keyword placement in the content of your landing pages to target the right searchers on the search engines.

Improve conversion rates

When searchers find your site for the first time, they may not be ready to commit to becoming a customer on that first visit. PPC ad campaigns bring people back to your site where they might see a page that they missed on their first visit. On the second visit, they’re more likely to commit to a sale or signup action.

Get more backlinks

An important part of search marketing is to encourage other sites to link to yours. When you attract the right visitors with ads, it’s likely that some of them will link to your website. This, in turn, helps your site rank higher in search result pages.

It’s great to gain presence and traffic online from search engines, but don’t overlook the benefits your business will get from using Google AdWords and Bing Ads. A two-fold approach will not only drive up your sales revenues, but it will speed up the process of gaining higher search page placement and greater brand awareness.