More than often, a PPC campaign and an SEO campaign will be structured, implemented and managed completely separately from one another. Despite this, achieving the best results from both marketing strategies comes with the two working in tandem, to maximise on their short-term and long-term capabilities (retrospectively).

What is the difference between PPC and SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation, optimising your site for indexing organically on search engines, is a great way to achieve long-term results that save you on paid media costs and work like a snowball affect. SEO has an ‘always on’ approach, once it’s implemented, you can expect to see continuous results if managed appropriately with algorithm updates.

PPC (Pay Per Click), on the other hand works like a light switch, you pay for the ads to appear on search engine results pages depending on the keywords you choose, however they’ll only appear with assigned budget. Once you turn them off, aside from some brand recall generated, they’re not helping your marketing strategy.

How Can PPC and SEO Work Together?

Since both marketing channels seek to achieve the same goal of generating strong visibility on search engines, they can work alongside one anothe effectively.

There are two approaches to having them work together:

  • Increasing visibility on search engines together: If there’s a high conviction keyword that generates sales or leads for your website, you should look to bid for the keyword and rank organically at the same time. This focuses on having your page appear multiple times on the first page of search results, through both organic and paid means. This method helps to generate more visibility at the same time, but it can lead to you wasting budget on paid ads
  • Maximising on areas were visibility is difficult: Sometimes it’s just too difficult and/or time-consuming to rank organically for your high conviction keywords. This is where PPC can come into play, by providing you with an opportunity to appear at the top of search results where you couldn’t organically. This allows you to target an audience you couldn’t before. Whilst this is an affective way of generating visibility, remember this is not a long-term solution.

How To Setup PPC and SEO Together?

Test New Keywords

PPC campaigns are a great way of instantly getting results if you’ve got the budget at hand. You can utilise a PPC campaign, with broad match and phrase match bidding, to search for keywords that you can focus your SEO ranking on.

Using Ad Copy to Test Page Copy

Sometimes it’s difficult to understand how to title your pages in order to get the highest click-through rate possible. This is where PPC can help, by allowing you to test different ad copy on the same search term. Once you find the ad copy that generates the highest click-through rates through PPC, you can more appropriately name your pages for organic ranking.

Remarketing Strategy

Your PPC campaign not only can be used for prospecting, but also for remarketing and retargeting users who came through your SEO strategy.

Google Ads, and other paid search advertising, allows you to utilise remarketing ads to directly target people who’ve previously visited your site through organic means. This is a great way of targeting users who showed interest in your product/brand, but didn’t quite convert.

Since PPC is so instantaneous, you can also very easily control the messaging that these users see.

Use Top Performing Keywords

Both the traffic you gain from organic search and paid search can benefit one another. When launching a paid search campaign, you can use the organic search queries that generate leads previously and implement them as keywords for bidding on campaigns. This also works vice versa, you can see what phrases work well for generating leads through your PPC campaign and look to rank for them organically as well.