Wondering how to bring the various elements of your advertising strategy together? If you’re new to some of the more detailed marketing strategies on the market, diving into paid advertising campaigns, PPC efforts, and search engine optimisation can seem overwhelming–but it doesn’t have to be.
So that you can see how well your PPC and SEO efforts can support one another to create a cohesive, and effective, marketing strategy for your business or brand, we’ve provided a top level overview of each below. From there, we dive into how each can influence and help boost the other so you’ll be building brand awareness and connecting with new online leads in no time.
Ready to level up your marketing efforts by combining SEO and PPC efforts? Read on.
Comparing PPC Ads and SEO Strategy
When your brand is ready to step it up a notch online, it can be a challenge to navigate the pros and cons of new marketing efforts, paid campaigns, freebie tools, and which is going to give you the best ROI.
To summarise the purpose behind both SEO and PPC strategies, we’ve summarised the need-to-knows below.
- Pay-per-Click Campaigns
Pay-per-click campaigns are a form of paid advertising that can help quickly find and drive new customers to your website and offer your business a host of real-time data that measures the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. A ‘faster fix’ than traditional SEO efforts, PPC ads can often be designed, implemented, and measured much more quickly than longer-term marketing campaigns that need to slowly, but steadily, connect with the Google algorithm, position your website as an authority in the marketing, and help connect your website content with potential user search intent.
Fortunately, there isn’t a one-type-fits-all approach to PPC so your business can look at your existing marketing collateral, target audience, and campaign goals and decide which will best represent and position your brand. Among the most popular PPC ad types, there are:
- Search Ads
- Display Ads
- Remarketing Ads
- Video Ads
- Shopping Ads
- Social Media Ads
With each ad type offering your brand the opportunity to find and connect with a wider audience on their preferred platform. Better yet, marketers have a good level of control over their marketing campaign parameters including total budget, amount willing and able to spend for each new click, and when (and where!) to scale up based on quickly acquired data.
If you’re looking for quick insight into your audience’s online behaviour so help inform other aspects of your overall marketing campaign, PPC campaigns are a great way to do it.
- Search Engine Optimisation
SEO–often considered a longer term marketing strategy but wildly effective nonetheless–can result in both increased organic and paid search traffic finding and connecting with your brand online.
A fantastic way to position your website as a website authority in a busy online marketplace, search engines rely on website content and aligned SEO to understand what your site is ‘about’ and then helps find and connect relevant users to your brand.
Why? Because Google and other search engines are in the business of connecting users with the websites, brands, business, and answers that are most relevant to their perceived needs, leveraging best SEO practices is an excellent way to help Google ‘understand’ what problem your website can solve and then drive additional, extremely relevant, traffic to your site.
- Digital Marketing Platforms and Tools
It’s worth pointing out that search engine optimisation and PPC are just two of a plethora of digital marketing tools that businesses can use to build brand awareness, connect with wider audiences, and drive customer engagement and sales. Other common terms you’ll often hear in marketing conversations alongside SEO and PPC include: CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), SERP (Search Engine Results Page), Impressions (the number of times a piece of content or marketing is shown online), and CTR (Click-through-Rate–particularly important with PPC ads and on search engine results pages.)
If you’ve started to consider either PPC for your paid marketing efforts and want to dabble in driving organic traffic to your website using SEO, you might be wondering if it’s best to action both or consider an either/or approach. We’ve summarised the benefits of each unique strategy below and then highlighted how they can work together if you really want to boost your presence online.
Among the top priorities and outcomes of great SEO work are one, boosting Google’s understanding of your business and brand, and two, increasing the likelihood of your website showing on the top search engine result pages. (SERP.) Why is this second outcome important? Because search engine users are more likely to trust the authority and offer of websites that show at the top search engine result pages. (With one study showing that the first listed result on SERPs captures upwards of 33% of all search engine traffic.)
While it can take longer for Google to crawl, understand, and position your website in front of relevant search engine users, the sooner you kick off on-page, off-page, and technical SEO work–the sooner you can start reaping the benefits of additional (highly relevant) traffic online. (Better yet–many SEO tactics can be undertaken for free; a fantastic solution if you’re working with a limited marketing budget and campaign spend.)
Prioritising PPC Advertising
Now that you understand the basics of each strategy, some of the top benefits to reap through PPC ads include:
- PPC is Quick to action:
Assuming you have the capacity to design and implement a PPC campaign in-house, you can have paid marketing efforts up, running, and collecting meaningful data in 1-2 days. With someone on your team who can help with ad copy, design, and organising a database to organise campaign results, if you want to get up, running, and connecting with more audience members online ASAP, PPC is the way to go. - PPC Can Show Quick Results:
If you’re looking for quick insight into your targeted user’s online behaviour, a paid PPC ad campaign can help you gain meaningful data that helps you understand the effectiveness of your marketing messaging, campaign design, and CTAs. - Can help determine additional ad spend:
Once the real-time data is rolling in, you can review the effectiveness of different campaign components and decide where to spend additional dollars that are showing the best ROI. - Increased brand awareness:
Simply want more eyes on your brand? Build quick brand awareness and drive potential viewers to your website, social media platforms, or simply start a conversation about your brand by running a paid PPC campaign online.
The Benefits of Search Engine Optimisation
A great analogy for the benefits gained through SEO efforts is “slow and steady”. Among the many reasons for deep diving into SEO work for your brand include:
- More affordable for limited ad spend:
If you want to start leveraging effective marketing strategies for your brand but are limited in ad spend, consider both on and off-page SEO tactics. With a bit of research and deep understanding of your business and target audience, you can learn to hack SEO best practices for your website that gain meaningful organic results. - Builds website authority status:
If you’re interested in being seen as a market leader, SEO can help boost your brand authority status by positioning your business as a go-to solution provider online. - Boost potential backlinks:
Want to drive even more traffic to your website from relevant and highly interested users? Backlinks are links on other websites that direct new online visitors to your website and brand. Another way to connect with new users unfamiliar with your brand, link building with other brands is also a great way to further position your website as an industry expert that other businesses and websites are willing to discuss and recommend. - Increase Organic Search Results:
While there are benefits to both paid and organic marketing tactics, focusing on organic rankings supports long-term, effective, and balanced digital marketing performance. By drilling down into keyword data, designing an organic keyword strategy, and fully completing important SEO texts that support a better user experience, actioning a great SEO strategy means positioning your website for organic listings now that can help balance the need for ongoing, paid advertising.
Bringing Together PPC Ads and SEO Strategies
Now that you have a basic understanding of the differences between and many benefits to be gained through both PPC and SEO campaigns, you may have an idea of how these two unique strategies can work together to help boost your brand.
Among the many ways that both PPC and SEO can help meet both short and long-term marketing and business goals, you can expect:
- Speed versus Sustainability:
Leveraging both PPC and SEO can help with a few quick wins–PPC campaigns are a great way to find and drive eyes to your brand in a short amount of time. On that note, while SEO campaigns can take longer to see meaningful results, you’ll end up connecting with online users who are highly relevant to what your business has to offer. In the interest of building brand awareness and connecting with and converting warm leads, using both campaign types can result in both quick and sustainable results.
- Ration Finite Marketing Budgets:
If you’re working with limited marketing dollars, leveraging what effective strategies and platforms you can use for free makes sense–while spending on effective paid tools can help you make the most of finite dollars. Because most solo-preneurs will be able to grasp the basics of SEO through online guides and How To’s, we recommend looking into how you can hack basic SEO best practices in-house while saving your ad spend for platforms (like PPC) that require a small amount of spend.
- In-depth User Analytics:
Campaigns that include gathering SEO and PPC data can offer you in-depth, detailed information about your online traffic and website visitors that can help you further refine and define all marketing efforts going forward. How? Because both strategies result in real-time data that represents actual online users, Google Ads, Google Analytics, and your website host can capture meaningful information about what best connects and converts your online leads. Examining what works and resonates with your audience (and helps achieve your business goals) means focusing on these efforts in the future–and learning quickly what doesn’t resonate or show meaningful ROI and letting it go.
Master PPC and SEO Tactics with the Edge Marketing Team
Our Edge Marketing experts are some of Australia’s best when it comes to all things to do with paid advertising opportunities, PPC campaigns, marketing strategies, website development, and content marketing. Whether you’re ready to outsource your marketing efforts to an experienced team, or need to work with a zero dollar budget and hack your campaigns alone, we have something available for you.
Connect with our friendly PPC and SEO teams today to see how our agency can work with you to position your business as an industry leader or follow our blog to learn how you can go it alone. With weekly blog posts and articles deep diving into best practices, changing search engine algorithms, and how you can get the best ROI for your finite marketing spend, our team is dedicated to making it easier than ever for every brand to develop, anchor, and position their presence online.
