PPC & SEO should talk

So you’re feeling pretty good about running effective Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns to bring qualified short-term traffic to your website – whilst building long-term rankings with your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategies – but are you approaching these workstreams as discrete, ‘never the twain shall meet’ activities, or are you getting them to talk to each other?

The fact is, SEO and PPC are the different sides of the same coin, and they’re there to do the same things for you – to develop leads, and develop customers.

Yes, one will be faster than the other (hello PPC you speedy thing), but it’s vital to invest in both to attract the right online customers. Let’s remember too that speed comes at a cost. Yes, you can instantly see a wave of qualified, relevant leads on your landing pages with a great PPC campaign. But this comes at a cost – literally a cost per click.

SEO, on the other hand, is a slow-burner that only requires the cost of your SEO practitioner investment – the hard work taken to optimise pages, deliver content and research keywords that help your digital assets to rank highly in the long-term for relevant user searches. PPC can be a very useful tool to identify the terms you should focus on in your larger SEO campaign though…Food for thought.

Get the best from both

To optimise your investment in these interrelated areas, think strategically and think holistically – rather than separating PPC and SEO into two camps. Test your target keywords with PPC, perfect the outcomes and then take your learning to SEO content development and page optimisation. This approach will pay off in the long run and help you to build organic search gains without having to pay every time someone clicks on your website.