How Does SEO Impact PPC Activity?

When crafting your digital marketing strategy, it’s important to understand what tools you have in your arsenal and how they work together to get the job done. Under the search engine marketing (SEM) umbrella, you have two powerful tools to help boost website traffic and increase conversion rates.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising offers owned media streams by buying targeted ads via search engines or social media. These paid ads usually show up as the top few listing of a search engine results page (SERP). These work by bidding for placement based on pre-decided keywords.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) creates earned traffic to your site by carefully curating content strategy, backlinking and keyword placement. This strategy builds traffic by increasing your Google ranking and making your site more prominent in the organic results list.

When the powers of PPC and SEO combine, they can help you better achieve your marketing outcomes. There are many ways in which the two tactics complement each other from delivering more qualified traffic, to higher visibility in search results and a better return on investment. Here are just a few of the ways that SEO and PPC work together.

Informed Keywords

If you already have SEO set up on your website, you can use the keywords you already have to kick off your PPC campaign. Once you start getting analytics from your PPC results, you can use those informed keywords to further tighten your website content with phrases you know are converting customers. The cyclical nature of these functions means they both help to inform the other’s strategy and performance.

Collective SERP Presence

PPC will usually appear above the organic results on SERPs. This means that people have to scroll past the ads to get to real listings. While some savvy shoppers are programmed to scroll past the first few sites, many still think that these are Google’s top listed organic results and will choose them before continuing down the list. If you’re optimising on PPC and SEO, then you may show up in both places, ensuring customers see your name at least once on the SERP. This increases the likelihood of a click-through and therefore, a website conversion.

Quality Traffic

SEO and PPC work together to help target your traffic based on specific keywords so that you can attract consumers who actually want to be on your site. This will lower your bounce rate and help you increase conversion once they begin interacting with your content. If the customers that are finding you are the ones who are searching for your key products and service offerings, chances are they have a higher chance of finding what they’re looking for on your site and sticking around.

Utilising Landing Pages

Creating targeted landing pages is a good idea for companies who are utilising SEM and digital marketing. These pages speak directly to your customers based on how they found you. For instance, you might get a different landing page if you search “Kids bikes Auckland” than if you search “Maintenance mountain bike”. These two searchers are looking for very different things, and even though you offer a product or service for both, you want to speak to them individually. PPC and SEO both allow you to funnel these customers based on their search words, bringing them confidence your site was the right click.

Covering Your Bases

While PPC can offer immediate increases in traffic and potential conversions, it requires consistent spending. Alternatively, sourcing traffic through organic SEO results is free, but waiting for keywords and website content to grow in the rankings can take months. SEO results will be slower but longer-lasting as you’ll continue to earn prominence across search engines that will help gain traffic for years to come. While it can take some time to see results with SEO, paid search is more immediate. That’s why we often recommend using a PPC campaign to offset a slow start to an SEO campaign. That way you’re ensuring that even if your SEO isn’t showing results yet, you’re still maximising keyword performance in the interim.

Ultimately, deciding on your digital marketing strategy will be an in-depth analysis of your customer profile, current search ranking and conversion rates. By utilising both SEO and PPC in tactical intervals, you can ensure that you’re targeting your customer base and attracting valuable traffic to your site all year long.

Zib Digital offers industry-leading digital marketing work to enhance business efforts. As specialists in an ever-growing industry, we help businesses facilitate an earned space for themselves within the digital landscape by focusing on clear and knowledgeable content, comprehensive owned media campaigns and top-ranked SEO websites. Get in touch to discuss specific digital marketing strategies for your business.