There are a range of digital marketing avenues available to businesses, with two of the most popular often being SEO and PPC marketing. Individually, these strategies are able to produce highly effective results for a company. But integration of both, can help to solidify an organisation’s both short-term and long-term marketing goals. To understand how this is possible, it’s important to first understand the advantages and disadvantages of each strategy, and how they can compliment and benefit one another.
Why PPC Marketing
PPC or pay-per-click marketing relates to paid advertising that charges per click or impression of an ad, depending on the outcome you want to achieve from the campaign. These types of ads are seen across a variety of platforms such as Facebook, Google, Instagram or YouTube and are highly effective at driving brand awareness and site traffic.
Advantages of PPC Marketing:
- Strong ability for ad tailoring – Ads can be tailored by platform, purchase behaviour and specific search terms.
- Fast results – PPC ads are highly effective at driving results quickly for businesses, due to their immediate and highly targeted nature.
- Real time performance analytics – Performance can be directly seen in the platforms analytics and linked to Google Analytics, which can aid in providing a wealth of data on consumer behaviour.
- High adaptability – Paid ads can be quickly modified while a campaign is still live, which is beneficial in an ever changing digital environment.
Disadvantages of PPC Marketing:
- High maintenance – PPC campaigns need to be continuously optimised to ensure the best possible performance and ensure that the business’s investment doesn’t go to waste.
Why SEO Marketing
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation looks at employing various tactics across a website to help ensure that the webpage appears high in Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). By appearing in a high position for certain search results, companies can gain high organic visibility, which in turn drives additional organic traffic to the website.
Advantages of SEO
- Develop strong organic traffic without needing to rely on paid traffic – SEO helps to build a foundation for significant growth of organic traffic to a website, meaning that the more short term lead generation from paid ads should be less necessary over time.
- Effective long term strategy – SEO is an effective long-term strategy, generating more consistent traffic growth to your website irrespective without the reliance on paid traffic.
- New and interesting content – One strategy of SEO is ensuring that the content on your website is highlighly optimised and relevant to your customers. SEO will help facilitate this.
- Strong data analytics – SEO can provide a host of interesting data for businesses such as insights into users search behaviour or new trends in an industry.
Disadvantages of SEO
- Longer term strategy with slow growing results – Strong positive results can be achieved with SEO, however this does take longer to achieve than say a paid campaign. It can often take 3-6 month to see more significant positive organic performance.
- Consistent management – SEO best practices regularly change and competitors are always looking to improve their own SEO standing. It takes continuous management to optimise a website’s SEO performance.
Combining SEO and PPC
As highlighted above, there are several advantages of PPC marketing campaigns which can complement SEO strategies and vice versa. Therefore when both are implemented as a combined strategy, businesses are able to achieve an effective balance of long-term and short-term benefits. On top of this, both PPC and SEO can also be utilised to the grow each others performance:
- Create more effective PPC campaigns – By using SEO and PPC together, businesses can learn new customer insights such as new target keywords or search trends. This can aid in developing new marketing campaigns around new trends in the market, or to further improve current campaigns.
- Maximise viewability on SERP – Google Ads are shown above organic search results. Meaning that when PPC is used effectively with SEO, a business can ensure very high visibility and real estate Google’s SERPs.
- Paid can aid SEO performance – One of the main drivers behind SEO performance is customer traffic. PPC as a strategy can aid in driving more potential customers to a website, increasing site traffic.
SEO and PPC are both highly effective strategies that businesses can employ to aid with their marketing efforts. For companies to truly gain an advantage, it is recommended to integrate both SEO and PPC together. This holistic strategy of SEO and PPC ensures a business is better equipped to adapt and grow their digital marketing presence. However as highlighted, both SEO and PPC require continuous maintenance to ensure positive marketing ROI. Therefore it is recommended to talk to SEO and PPC experts, like the team Redline Digital, to ensure the best possible outcome for your investment.