Insights How to make sure PPC and SEO work in tandem

Prioritising your marketing channels when bringing your digital presence to life is often a complex problem faced by most businesses. From focusing your efforts on social media platforms, to increasing your organic traffic and determining whether or not you should run Google Ads. This is often complicated, with each of your marketing teams operating in different silos with different business goals in mind. However, many businesses often miss out on the benefits of how marketing channels, namely PPC and SEO, can work together to achieve better results.

Now as easy as this may sound, it can often be more difficult than expected. This is due to a number of factors that can impact how your SEO and PPC campaigns can work together. Some of these key problems include SEO strategies hampering the performance of PPC campaigns, and potential PPC cannibalisation for key SEO Keywords. However, getting both of these channels to work in tandem can help your business grow exponentially. Over the course of this article we will cover both the key benefits and steps brands can take to ensure both of these channels boost the online performance of your business. 

The Key Benefits of PPC and SEO Working in Tandem

The starting point to getting the benefits of both your PPC and SEO campaigns comes down to your overall marketing strategy. This essentially defines the key steps that each channel can play to bring increased benefits to your website. 

One of the key benefits of running these channels in tandem is increased website visibility. This is due to the fact that studies have shown that website users are more likely to click through an organic listing than a paid ad. Additionally, ensuring that your organic listing appears first for specific keywords helps to showcase the dominance of your website in a specific industry. This can be helped by the running of PPC ads for broader keyword targeting and can ultimately assist your SEO efforts by ensuring that your website appears to a broader audience. 

Needless to say, this increased visibility from both your SEO and PPC efforts can result in increased traffic to your website as well as helping direct and refine the targeting efforts of both your organic and paid targeting across Google’s landscape. Given the quick nature of results generated by paid campaigns ensuring that these efforts run in tandem can help marketers both test and refine their overarching marketing strategies. 

The final benefit of running SEO and PPC campaigns in tandem can lead to better performance of both channels. This is due to the fact that PPC landing pages enriched with optimised SEO keywords and copy can help drive the overall cost per click of paid ads along, whilst driving up paid clickthrough rates and can mitigate the likelihood of these channels being impacted by Google penalties. This is mainly seen with a decline in the amount of duplicate website content created, specifically seen with the creation of duplicate PPC landing pages for various campaigns. 

In essence, running SEO and PPC campaigns in tandem can help bridge the gaps that may emerge in your digital marketing strategies. With this being said, how can YOU ensure that your SEO and PPC campaigns are working to drive better results for your digital marketing strategy?

How To Get PPC and SEO campaigns to Work In Tandem

Now that we have discussed the benefits of running PPC and SEO campaigns in tandem, the question of how to get the best out of your PPC and SEO efforts emerges. The starting point of doing so begins with first defining your overall digital marketing strategy. In this step you should first analyse your existing SEO and PPC performance. This is aimed at mainly helping benchmark the performance of these channels and can assist in helping to set achievable KPIs for marketing efforts and better measure performance. 

Once your overall marketing strategy has been defined, it is advised that you ensure there is clear communication between your SEO and PPC teams. This is to ensure that there are defined common goals in order to guide targeting of campaign keywords, and identify any potential issues with website content for current campaigns. This will highlight any paid campaigns with thin content or fix targeting for duplicate website landing pages etc. 

Finally, it is key to ensure that there are consistent feedback meetings between your SEO and PPC teams to ensure that campaigns are optimised, as well as highlight any potential technical issues that could be fixed. 

We can see that many businesses are often confused when it comes to prioritising their marketing channels, specifically seen for PPC and SEO efforts. However, this is often misplaced with the benefits that these channels can provide your business. Namely through increased campaign visibility and increased traffic across both the organic and paid search channels. This is, however, all underpinned and begins with an effective marketing strategy in which to direct these efforts. If you are still struggling to get the best out of your PPC and SEO campaigns then feel free to talk to a member of our expert performance team to assist your business today.