Often the SEO and PPC strategies are handled separately. By combining these two tactics, however, retailers can achieve far greater business outcomes and SERP results.
Most e-commerce retailers believe their marketing campaigns for SEO and PPC are separate marketing activities from each other. They are even sometimes seen as alternatives to each other, with brands only investing in one at a time. It is a terrible error, of course, because SEO and PPC approaches are required to merge into each other for a site to achieve its full potential within the SERPs.
SEO is a tool for optimizing organic traffic on a site by enhanced visibility and site authority. Alternatively, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising seeks to generate traffic in search engines, social and other popular online destinations through carefully designed and targeted advertisements.
Both strive to accomplish common goals, but each one’s marketing strategy is different. In addition, SEO and PPC strategies are often dependent on each other, feeding the other with crucial information to help boost the other’s efficiency.
In order to better understand the symbiotic relationship between these two marketing methodologies, let’s discuss in-depth these two strategies, how they are different, how they are similar, and how SEO and PPC specifically feed each other’s performance.
How are SEO and PPC work differently?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) variations is the practice aimed at improving the consistency and quantity of traffic a site receives from search engines like Google or Bing. There are a number of SEO ranking enhancement strategies, including content creation, technological optimization, link building, and other such practices. PPC advertisement, on the other hand, is a form of digital marketing in which marketers pay an allocated sum each time a person clicks on one of their adverts.
Although all of these approaches are adopted under the Search Engine Marketing (SEM) umbrella, there are several important variations between these two principles.
Next, paid ads (usually) appear at the top of the lists of search engines – above the organic rankings – which are affected by implementations of search engine optimization.
Additionally, advertisers who create traffic from their ads have to pay for such visits to these pages. That is just not true for organic listings which obtain clicks through the use of best SEO practices as a result of gaining visibility.
Moreover, the effects of PPC campaigns created – be it visibility, traffic, conversions or all of the above – are immediate. Nevertheless, after the promotion finishes, metrics from a platform are likely to return to pre-campaign levels.
Alternatively, SEO approaches frequently take a long time to build traction and for several months or even years, companies cannot see a return on their investment. However, once the search optimization technique of a business begins to generate results, such improvements tend to be highly productive and long lasting.
The similarities between SEO and PPC
Although PPC and SEO are in many ways different, they also share some obvious things in common.
First of all, both strategies are aimed at pushing traffic to a website and are most often intended to produce conversions. Although one achieves so by compensated means and the other through the effort of organically scaling the SERPs, the end result remains the same.
Second, both SEO and PPC are methods guided by the keywords. While marketers perform keyword analysis to classify prosperous sentences to bid on and useless ones to remove through negative keyword lists, SEOs may also examine specific words to understand how names, content and technical elements can be optimized as well as other, on-site, essential elements.
Having explained the differences that exist of these two approaches, let’s discuss whether using SEO and PPC together is the recipe for success in search engine results.
Why SEO and PPC benefit each other?
It is not only true that SEO and PPC are frequently following the same goals, but in fact each strategy helps the other and generates results in both campaigns.
PPC supports SEO efforts by: Optimizing SERP visibility While a site is running PPC ads, it appears at the top of the search results, thereby being the first thing searchers see.
A brand will theoretically absorb a significant portion of the SERPs when paired with SEO activities, showing adverts at the top and organic listings below. Therefore, if a searcher skips over the ad section and goes to the organic rankings directly, they can always find the business there.
This essentially helps sites to gain twice the exposure they would gain if just one of these tactics were used, thus raising the likelihood of the customer going to the site of the brand.
In addition, given that a specific business is so well-represented in the SERPs, this gives customers more trust that the business is a trustworthy one offering reliable goods or services.
Through incorporating SEO and PPC, companies can direct the prospects to their web more efficiently and promote customer interaction.
Keyword Evolution on search engine platforms
In similar searches the keyword symbiosis SEO and PPC are both highly reliant on keyword surface optimization. For businesses to appear in the SERPs for specific requests, the right terms and phrases must be targeted. For brands that have been search-optimizing their websites for quite some time, they also have keyword data that can help inform their PPC campaigns to deliver better results.
Gaging the efficiency of their efforts can, however, be a challenge for those who are new to SEO, considering that the tests take time to reveal. But because PPC campaigns yield immediate results, marketers can collect keywords that have proven lucrative and transfer the knowledge on to SEO teams to optimize sites for increased exposure and traffic.
Using keyword knowledge from PPC campaigns will help SEOs understand the types of words users are searching for to expose the pages of a company. Instead of waiting for SEO data to start rolling in, marketers may make the requisite changes to SEO campaigns using PPC data.
Then, when SEO results begin to show that information can be returned to PPC marketers to help improve their promotions’ effectiveness.
Increased brand recognition
They are brought to a landing page when a customer clicks a PPC advertisement where they hear about a company and its offers. From there they could further explore a page to get a better feel for the company. They may get confused in certain cases and bounce off the site.
Although this may sound quite disheartening, the customer has just become aware of the company and what it is selling through the PPC ad. For the context, as that person searches for similar goods or services, they are likely to recall their experience with the website of the company and click on its organic listings. When prospective clients become more familiar with a brand, they are more likely to engage with its organically listed content, resulting in high traffic rates and (potentially) conversions.
Ultimately, PPC advertising helps raise visibility for a company, even if prospects don’t convert instantly, which may lead to more organic traffic in the future.
These are only a handful of forms that support both SEO and PPC.
But if business owners do not understand how this information can be tracked and calculated, this clarification is all for them to better understand the nuances of marketing with SEO and PPC strategically.
How to track and assess success?
The reality is that different organizations may have different goals. Since the KPIs used to calculate these goals will differ, we will discuss this subject through an online business’ two most popular goals: traffic and conversions.
The SEM targets of an organization need not be difficult. We should not be too simplistic though, either.
At Chattertools we have our Client’s objectives include details such as:
- The target amount of traffic to produce
- The budget to be spent on these leads
- The timetable to receive the traffic within
There are a number of essential PPC KPIs that marketers can calculate. The most important ones to track in the context of this discussion, however, are click-through levels and conversions.
By analyzing the click-through and conversions produced by specific keywords, advertising is able to understand the terms prove fruitful in getting customers to take the desired action and generate revenue for a company. There are a number of online tools to utilize for better SEO and PPC optimizations. Few amongst them are Semrush, ahrefs, moz, Buzzsumo, etc. Keywords which have been the most useful can then be fed to the SEO department of a company for on-site optimization and content development.
Google Analytics should be their main tool from the SEO side of things to calculate the results of optimization efforts. The KPIs these people may want to examine include:
- Keyword rankings
- Time spent on the Website
- Organic Traffic
- Organic Sales
Assessing these statistics through Google Analytics will let advertisers know whether they are targeting the right keywords, whether customers are finding a site with those terms, whether users find their on-site experience engaging and whether visitors are therefore converting. PPC and SEO teams will work together to improve the efficiency and productivity of each approach by evaluating and monitoring this knowledge.
SEO and PPC have much in common, mainly because they each work to achieve company goals.
As these two strategies are fundamentally related, it is imperative that retailers learn how to feed back and forth information between their SEO and PPC teams because that is the true secret to winning the SERP market.
