SEO And PPC: How To Integrate The Two Services For Higher ROI In The First Year
When it comes to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC), the two services are often considered to be at loggerheads by marketers, who approach them independently. Most organisations have separate teams working on their SEO and PPC strategies with different objectives, and no interaction.
However, they fail to understand that to rank higher on SERPs, the two services need to be aligned in a harmonious relationship. The coming together of these inbound marketing techniques works in favour of generating the maximum output from the investment budget.
During the first year of your digital marketing process, SEO experts at Netvision suggest utilising a blend of the two strategies to maximise website traffic and amplify the conversion opportunities. The thought behind using them simultaneously is that they complement each other and restrict the loss of potential leads.The data retrieved from PPC ads is beneficial for SEO practices and vice versa.
Thus the powerful combination of both can give the competitors a run for their money. Being on top of both organic and paid search results establishes a commanding presence online and allows the planning of a robust marketing strategy. Let us enlighten you with the details of implementing an integrated digital plan in your first year to get the desired results.
1. Get Started With PPC Ads and Focus On Local SEO
When you have just launched your website and are eagerly awaiting traffic, you need to get started with an aggressive PPC ads campaign to increase the brand awareness. At the same time, you need to work on developing a solid foundation for SEO to gain traffic organically.
If you already have a website which has not been generating any leads, then a PPC campaign using Google Ads can prove effective in gaining traction. Leverage Google Ads to find the keywords being utilised by the target audience as search terms on the major search engine – Google.
With more and more consumers using long-tail phrases for searching products and services, using PPC data for SEO keyword strategy is a smart move. The data obtained from PPC helps in understanding consumer behaviour, traffic growth, search volume, and interaction rate. Thus you must divert the flow of your marketing budget towards these ads to get a wealth of useful information.
The high-performing ads can be analysed to find the keywords which can be used in the landing page content on the website. The non-performing ads can be stopped, and the non-performing keywords can be removed from your list. This information can aid in creating a symbiotic relationship between SEO and PPC that strengthens the marketing plan. You must also consider using remarketing in your PPC campaigns in the first quarter to make people revisit the website.
From the local SEO point of view, you need to create the Google My Business profile as it works like an online storefront and appears on the screens of the users before they make a purchase. It allows the search engine to give a credible status to your website as a legitimate business.
The location extension can work wonders in generating more local business so use specific keywords to ensure the appearance of the profile during local searches. The location-based keywords need to be embedded in the landing pages of the website as well. The targeted keywords must be included in all the content such as articles, blogs, videos, which should be knowledge-based and highly useful.
The high-quality content will get ranked higher by the search engines and increase the traffic. Enhancing the quality score not only pushes your website up in the rankings but also impacts the position of the ads on the SERPs. A joint effort on the optimisation of the landing pages and the PPC ads can play a significant role in enhancing the ROI of the campaign.
2. Broaden Your Ad Reach And Use PPC For Content Marketing
Once you enter the second quarter, you need to look at expanding into newer territories through advertising. This can be accomplished by introducing new ad platforms like social media campaigns and other search engines like Bing to capture the demographics which are not on Google.
Social media marketing is an excellent platform to connect with your audience and engage them to drive traffic and sales. The social networks Facebook and Instagram can be effectively exploited to make an impact on the viewers through pictures, promotions and posts. The granular targeting attribute of social media platforms can be utilised to tap exclusive target markets.
In the second quarter, the SEO strategy should concentrate on targeting the top search terms for both local and national audience. Also, the SEO executives must work on earning maximum backlinks from reputable and non-competitive websites as well as getting citations on local directories, social platforms, apps and websites. This will help in improving the local search engine rankings.
Additionally, the business must constantly churn out informative content to rank higher on SERPs and get more traffic. Another way of getting more visitors on the low performing pages is to find the users who are spending a fair amount of time on your site.
Now create PPC ads which take the user to these low performing pages and re-target the users who spent time on the website. You can add site links of these struggling pages to the ads to get the relevant traffic. It works because the audience you are targeting is interested in similar content and is highly likely to respond to these pages.
3. Introduce Display Ads and Begin Local Advertising
As soon as you step into the third quarter of your first year, you must surprise your audience with exciting display ads as well as local campaigns. Create enticing display ads on Google Ads with high-resolution images to build the brand’s credibility and give it top of the mind recall value.
Additionally, marketers must keep producing local PPC ads to stay visible in front of the local customers who are not looking at the organic results. Next in line is advertising on YouTube, the largest digital video platform that has billions of users, which can prove advantageous. Simple display ads running at the bottom of the videos with innovative graphics can do the trick of attracting the attention of the viewers.
Google Ads allows marketers to include a link of specific product pages in the PPC ads. Such campaigns have an image of the product along with customer reviews and ratings and take the user directly on the product page to make a purchase. Naturally, e-commerce businesses can reap the benefits of this functionality and boost their sales.
Now that you have stabilised your SEO strategy, you can think about targeting the national or international keywords depending upon the nature of your business and its reach. You need to keep working on writing optimised content with keywords that are getting the maximum visitors identified from the reports provided by Google Analytics.
The data collected about the PPC ads getting most conversions helps in creating ideal title tags and meta tags that assist in ranking up in the search engine results pages. Since you get the PPC performance reports weekly, you can quickly work on improving these tags and content of the website.
4. Optimisation and Development
In the fourth quarter, the strategists must prepare to optimise the ad campaigns running online by assessing their performance on Analytics, YouTube, Bing Ads, and Facebook. The SEO executives can identify the ads which are garnering the highest click-through-rates and invest in those campaigns further and remove the ones that are not performing as expected.
Just getting the clicks is half the battle won, getting them converted is the job of SEO which is accomplished by landing page optimisation that persuades the users to take action. The analytics reports will also help you to identify the pages that are getting the maximum conversions.
You can expand the social media campaigns to Pinterest and LinkedIn if your audience is visiting these sites. Also, mobile responsiveness is a common ranking factor for both SEO and PPC. Thus marketers must work on creating mobile-friendly content and campaigns especially to leverage the voice-based searches.
Content marketing must become the centre of focus, and you must create shareable and engaging pieces every day and publish them on multiple channels of communication such as blogs, social media profiles, guest posts etc. You must keep refreshing the website content to keep it updated and dynamic.
This is also the time to gain more backlinks as you have earned authority in the digital marketplace. The ads being created by PPC team must match with the content being published online by the business to improve the post-click experience of the users. The data analysed from both PPC and SEO strategies offers a deeper insight into the conversions and aids in modifying the overall strategy accordingly.
5. Combating Negative Feedback And Reviews
Wherever you are in the business life cycle, you can get affected by negative feedback and criticism. It can tarnish your image online and gravely decline your sales. Thus to combat such a dangerous situation, you must gear up your marketing strategy which is a mix of SEO and PPC.
To change the public opinion, you need to identify the keywords which are being used by the audience to search for the incident or issue and the common questions they are asking. Now create a detailed article or blog answering these questions and clearing the air about the miscommunication or the problem.
Your next step should be to run a campaign with these keywords, so the next time users type these phrases to find information about the controversy, they will get directed to your blog. This way your target audience will get to hear your response and reaction before reading any fake news related to the topic.
The SEO executives in Gold Coast must also work on long-term branding by creating optimised content which highlights the company name, its mission and vision statement, location etc. On the other hand, PPC can be applied for short-term branding goals by creating campaigns for press releases, product launches, awards, offers, holiday sale etc.
Conclusion
The first year of digital marketing needs to be trodden with caution as you are still testing the waters. However, the best way to go about it is to let the SEO and PPC teams work as a synchronised unit by sharing the critical information and creating optimised campaigns as well as content which help in outranking the competition.
