Balancing paid and organic search strategies for optimum success

30-second summary:
Even though it is evident that SEO and PPC are great tools, these two disciplines work in silos
In fact, these teams and channels mostly work on their own in silos and are often handled separately
Accenture Song's SEO Manager, Michael McManus discusses how businesses can combine paid and organic SEO to function as one value-add unit
SEO and PPC are a must-have in your arsenal when planning your marketing strategy. Depending on what they are looking to do, most companies tend to choose one over the other, if they are looking to increase their rankings and get traffic from organic search, then they will go with SEO, whereas PPC focuses on getting instant "paid for" traffic from such areas as search, social, and display.
Both SEO and PPC are great tools to boost your site/brand's authority as well as help generate more traffic and sales for your business. But these two teams/channels tend to work on their own in silos and are often handled separately.
Now while both of these options can and do work well on their own, having both teams work together can be a powerful strategy for any business. Instead of working apart and potentially fighting for budget, time, resources, and rankings. By bringing both departments together so that they can collaborate and work as one, they will benefit from different insights and learnings that they would otherwise not get on their own. These insights will allow them to produce amazing results in both campaigns.
These two marketing channels aren't meant to operate independently, yet that is the case almost every single time. But instead of looking at both channels as separate entities and you bring them together, you'll see that they can help you achieve better results across the board than having them work on their own.
The data and insights that you can get from PPC campaigns are extremely insightful and powerful. When you take that data and combine it with your SEO strategies, it will give you the insights that you can use to create content that will make a big difference to your organic search traffic.
Balancing organic and paid search strategies for optimum success is a key challenge and lots of businesses need to catch up as they are typically only using one of these strategies.
How SEO and PPC can work together to boost your business
Along with large amounts of keyword and conversion insights that SEO can use by working with PPC, another huge benefit that companies can achieve when they bring both SEO and PPC together is the potential to consume a large portion of the SERPs, where they can showcase ads at the top of the page while owning the organic listings below.
This is something that shouldn't be overlooked as it gives you more chances to capture the user, who might be looking for your brand or something that your brand has to offer. For example, let's say you are running PPC and SEO campaigns separately and a user does a search and your ad appears, but they skip over it and go right to the organic listings but you are not showing up for that particular search, you are potentially missing out on capturing that user.
So now if you are using both PPC and SEO together and you use your PPC data to gather insights as to what the users were and are searching for, where your ads are showing, but not your organic listings. You can then take that data and start to create great content for those terms and optimize your site for that phase of the user's journey. Now you can potentially have your site's PPC ads showing at the top of the page as well as your site showing up below those ads in the organic results. This means that if a searcher were to skip over your ad and go directly to the organic results, your site will also be listed there winning you greater brand discovery.
Bringing both PPC and SEO together and working side by side, and taking over the SERPs for a given keyword will not only allow you with getting more exposure than what you would get if you only used SEO or PPC, but you now also increase the visibility of your site and the chances that a user will click over to your site.
Another added benefit from combining both SEO and PPC and taking over the SERPS is that users, searchers, and potential customers are more likely to see value and trust in a brand that is well represented across the SERPs.
If you were able to help guide and encourage users to click through to your site, wouldn't that be an effort worth the implementation?
Getting SEO and PPC to work for you
Well, you might be asking yourself "ok great now I know that I need to have both SEO and PPC work as one, how do I go about this?"
Here are some practical tips to have both SEO and PPC work together.
Keywords
Keywords are important to both SEO and PPC as each one is reliant on them to help with creating the proper content for each strategy. They are both going to want to target the proper and relevant keywords in order to show up in the SERPs when a user is searching for information, shopping, looking for a brand, etc.
Using the keyword data and insights from your PPC campaigns and providing that information to your SEO team, will allow them to then create content that a user is searching for and thus be able to be in front of the customer throughout their journey.
Creating ads
Paid social media ads as well as retargeting ads are a great way for you to get your content shared across different platforms that will help with getting backlinks that will help your site's content rank organically. While this is happening, you can create retargeting ads that will help to capture users' attention once they have left your site.
PPC data
As we mentioned earlier, PPC campaign data has a plethora of information that you can use to help create highly targeted content to help get your site's pages to rank organically. From your PPC campaigns, you'll be able to see things like keyword search data, impressions, CTR, and so much more.
This will allow you to better optimize your site's content and create content that might be missing, as well as help with creating highly targeted and optimized page titles and descriptions.
Conclusion
It's no longer about SEO vs PPC anymore, or at least it shouldn't be after reading this article. Now that you are aware of the potential benefits of combing both your PPC and SEO efforts, it's time to go out and implement this new strategy.
Armed with all the data that you have at your fingertips from your PPC campaigns, use this new data and insights to help with creating better SEO strategies, that will give you a competitive advantage and help you with reaching your customers at every step of their journey.
It's time to stop treating SEO and PPC as silos and time to bring them together so that your site can benefit from the added data and insights so that your site can dominate the SERPs.
Remember SEO and PPC are each other's most powerful tools.
Michael McManus is SEO Manager at Accenture Song. Michael has hands-on expertise in branding strategies, website structure/architecture and development, SEO strategies, and online marketing campaigns.
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