Why You Should Use Both SEO and PPC to Dominate Search

By Mia Harrison

Your new website is up and running and you are now ready to get traffic there, viewing your services and making their purchases, but first, you need to get your website in front of the search engine audience. 

As with most businesses that aren’t known globally, you need to rank well on the first page of the search engine results for searchers to find you. Unfortunately, with this, you could be waiting between 6-9 months for a user to find you if you are only using search engine optimization (SEO) to get your website on the first page. 

You need another marketing method to help get your website seen during this time. This is where pay-per-click (PPC) marketing comes in to help. Due to its almost immediate results, Google Ad’s PPC campaigns can help your business see an impressive income during this time. As well as proving to be a great alternative while you work on your SEO strategy, there are many other benefits to running PPC alongside your SEO activities. 

Increased Exposure

Running a PPC campaign while you work on the search engine optimization of a website allows your business to be seen despite the 6- to 9-month wait that comes with gaining the organic results. Did you know search ads increase brand awareness by 80%?

However, continuing to run this paid search campaign once you have seen successful results from your organic search campaign has even more benefits; your business has the opportunity to dominate the search results when someone places a search for one of your focus keywords, not only will your website appear on the organic results, it will also be there as an ad.

Remarketing Opportunities 

You have the opportunity to get back in front of previous website users when utilising both SEO and PPC. Google Ads allows you to run remarketing adverts that target your previous website users.

Not only can you get back in front of those who found you through organic search, but you can also reach those who come across your business through social media and referrals. It is as simple as setting up an audience in Google Analytics, selecting your desired audience profiles and adding this audience to your Google Ads remarketing campaign.

Valuable Keyword Insight

Pay-per-click campaigns can give you some invaluable keyword data that you won’t find anywhere else. These campaigns will get you real-time data on the keywords of your choice, which can help inform your organic keyword strategy.

Find out which terms work, which don’t and even find some combinations you’d never thought of before! This is the perfect time to trial out your keyword strategy and change it around before it is too late.

Immediate Feedback 

One of the many PPC perks is the immediate response you will receive. Unlike SEO, you can expect to see results within 24 hours, giving you an increased ability to play around with campaigns. If you find that change hasn’t worked in favor of your results you can rework these changes.

This can work for ad text, keywords, ad extensions and more.

Test New Content 

The great thing about Google Ads is the opportunity advertisers have to run a variety of campaigns, each containing a different message and call to action.

Better yet, you can run responsive ads in which you can suggest a range of headlines and descriptions, Google Ads will then run these headlines and descriptions in a range of combinations, allowing insight into which set users responded better to.

These results can help marketers make an informed decision of which text to use as page titles, header tags and meta descriptions.

Stop-Start Ability

Finally, running PPC ads alongside an SEO campaign gives advertisers the options to stop and start campaigns as they please. For example, if a taxi company is experiencing a quiet period each day between 2 pm and 4 pm, the advertiser has the option to run adverts only for that period to increase bookings, turning these off at 6 pm when business is normally booming.

This is a great advantage for a business who run seasonal promotions and what increase exposure for a short campaign.

So, no matter your business, running both PPC and SEO campaigns alongside each other can be beneficial for a magnitude of reasons, not limited to those listed above.