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By Ryan Boog
Did you know that organic and paid search can combine to be a power-packed duo?
While people can be in either the “organic” camp or the “paid” camp, most savvy digital marketers realize that there can be benefits to integrating both methods of marketing. As many digital marketers understand well, SEO and PPC can complement each other by providing more visibility for a keyword and providing insights from their respective strategy processes to combine for a more effective campaign.
Depending on the study you cite, organic search has historically taken the majority of clicks for a given SERP. Organic results are considered, for the most part, to be more trusted, more geared toward the web visitor, and more relevant. For a long time, people have ragged on PPC as draining budgets dry and not actually delivering targeted traffic.
While PPC may not make sense for every brand, it can actually return targeted, interested traffic effectively.
Some people worry that investing in paid search takes away from the benefits and results of organic search investment. Although paid results are listed above organic results, there are studies that indicate searchers are more likely to click on an organic listing after seeing the same ad for the same website.
Organic and paid search are different animals. Although both work with keywords, paid search tends to be more call-to-action focused. Users who click tend to be closer to the eventual buying phase, while users who click on organic results may be more interested in gathering information and learning more about products or services. Paid traffic’s value most likely doesn’t vary by position, while organic’s traffic does.
However, the two often work together to achieve good results. Take a look at the search results page for "baby clothes." You'll notice that Carter's shows up for both the paid and organic search results.
A double whammy! This is an example of the increased visibility that integrating SEO and PPC can bring you.
Seasonal campaigns or campaigns that need to get quick attention and traffic can both benefit from utilizing PPC as well as organic. Because PPC ads go straight to the first page of Google and catch attention quickly, they tend to be effective for time-sensitive information.
For e-commerce websites advertising products, paid search can benefit SEO because ads typically have high conversion rates. For e-commerce, it slightly higher average orders.
When creating SEO campaigns, expertise gleaned from Google Ads research and also from SEO analytics can together inform even better SEO strategies than one or the other on their own.
PPC data can give a clear idea of exactly what kind of ROI and conversion value a keyword will have. SEO data can describe traffic for a given keyword. Together, the two data resources allow you to pick keywords that actually bring in revenue - not just traffic.
Ready to bring in revenue and not just traffic?