Paid search and SEO work in unique ways to get visitors to your website. While paid search can yield almost immediate results, it can be costly. On the other hand, SEO comes at little to no cost, but it can take some time for optimisation efforts to impact your organic rankings. That being said, both of these marketing approaches are important, but can adopt different priorities depending on your timeframe and goals.
Traditionally, these approaches were managed separately, but today, more and more businesses are realising the value of combining paid search and SEO. Since both are reliant on keywords to be effective, it makes sense that both should be integrated in some way.
Here are our top tips on how to do just that:
Keyword Expansion
Tools like Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are fantastic for establishing which keywords are driving the most traffic to your website. If those keywords aren’t currently present in your paid search campaign, add them in to see what impact they have, and use your AdWords tools to determine if the traffic volume is worth the cost. Also, take your highest converting paid terms and try to prioritise those that have a chance of ranking organically – chances are those keywords may have a good chance of converting organically too – so start creating content around those terms to improve your ranking in Google.
Capitalise on Compelling Copy
Find your best performing ads (in terms of click-through rate and conversion rate) and to try apply those headlines and ad copy into your title tags and meta descriptions. Also, take copy from top performing organic pages and apply it to paid ads to see how it works.
Test out different content
In terms of SEO, content truly is king. Before creating content around certain keywords, try testing it out with paid search first to see if it converts well here. If it does, it has a good chance of working well for SEO too; but if it doesn’t, it may not be worthwhile investing too much time into creating content with these keywords. SEO takes time to generate results so it’s a great idea to test out keywords on paid search first, to avoid wasting time on unnecessary content.
See here for our study: Why Service sells best? SEO, PPC, content marketing or SMM?
Paid Links + Organic Links = Clicks
Research has found that people are more likely to click on a paid link if they see your organic link is also listed, and vice-versa. So unless your organic ranking is within the top three positions, it’s difficult to come by clicks. If you’re not on the first page of the SERPs, it’s even less likely you’ll get the traffic you want. It’s therefore advisable to run paid search in tandem with your top organic links, otherwise you could be losing out on precious clicks.
Establish who your competitors are
Pay per Click reports can determine who your competitors are and you may be surprised by the results. It might come as a surprise that companies that you never considered to be your competitors actually are, and you can use this information to your advantage.
Closing thoughts
These five approaches can help to improve both your SEO and paid search efforts and gain insights into what works and what doesn’t for your business. By adopting these approaches you’ll waste no more time on unnecessary marketing, instead focusing on the areas that truly make a difference.
If you’re looking to increase traffic to your website and gain new leads, contact 8 Ways Media today.
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