Both search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) advertising are now established ways to market your business, but the way you should use them both is completely different. It’s important to be realistic in your expectations of what both of these marketing methods are possible of, and work each to its full advantage. Utilizing both SEO and PPC will drive the most traffic to your website, but each has to be handled differently. Looking at the technical aspects of each and understanding where each method’s efficiency lies will give you the best chance at a successful online marketing campaign.
SEO & PPC - How To Utilize their Strengths Perfectly
SEO: In it for the Long Haul
SEO is a long term campaign that requires meticulous attention to detail, addressing your websites coding, content, and links. Without a continued effort to keep your website credible, fresh, and continually updated climbing search engine rankings simply won’t happen. When organic SEO is done correctly and effectively it can beat the return on investment (ROI) from PPC significantly.
Firm Foundations
The best SEO needs to begin with the construction of your website, think of it as the foundations. Having a focused campaign of what keywords you want to target is essential at this stage, because you can correlate it with your PPC keywords. Trying to go back into a website and switch things round for SEO purposes is time-consuming and costly, and the best SEO websites are built from scratch with coding specifically for your needs.
Fresh Content and Trusted Links
Content comes next, and is the bread and butter that keep feeding the search engines appetite. Without regular, fresh, interesting, and search engine friendly content (forget keyword heavy repetitive crap) a website with excellent SEO potential will slide down the rankings. Adding a blog and news section to your website gives you places to put this content while not affecting the overall site content. Making sure the content is relevant to your marketing campaign, and engages your readers, is the number one rule here. The InboundWriter app is a good place to start if you need a little help with this.
Having links to your website helps boost your websites reputation. Links to your website from other properly search engine optimized websites creates an efficient network which can hoist you even higher in search engine rankings. On the other hand, links to untrusted sources will not help. The initial stages of your SEO campaign are the most important, because if your site is viewed by search engines as being dormant, with no fresh content or links, they will side-line it in favour of newer sites that are ticking all the boxes.
Doing it Right the First Time Around
If you’re not going to do your SEO yourself, make sure you go for someone high up in the search engine ranking for what you specifically need. If they can’t get their own website to the top, then what hope is there that they can get your up there. Steer clear of any bold claims from so-called SEO experts to get you top of Google in a month. You may get there, but the underhand methods used could ruin your website within 6 months. Make a worthwhile investment in your SEO from the start, and the rewards further down the line can be significant. It may be a cost that shows no immediate results, but once you’re ranking highly the cost of keeping your website high should reduce.
PPC : Quick Results with Experimentation
Without getting the SEO aspects of your marketing campaign in order first, you could waste a lot of money on PPC. The reason being that if your website does not seem reliable or in any way not credible, the money you spend on the clicks that send customers to your website will be for nothing. No one is going to want to buy from a website they are at all unsure of, and they might not come back even when you have cleaned up your website. Despite this, PPC will drive traffic to your website much faster than SEO during the initial stages of launching a website.
Traffic from the Get-Go
Once your site is in order turning on the taps for PPC advertisements should send customers flooding your way, if it is done correctly. It’s also worth mentioning that unless you have a sustainable budget for PPC adverts, your stream of customers can be stopped as easily as it started. Despite this, the simple fact is that you can get traffic sent to your website within a week or two, which is much quicker than using SEO methods, which can take a number of months to really kick in, an even longer for desired results to be seen.
Adapt for Better Results
One thing PPC holds high over SEO is that you can quickly adapt it to meet changes in the market, or just experiment with different strategies to see which works better. This agility makes PPC much more responsive and potentially lucrative, but increased gain also brings with it the risk of increased loss. A good PPC advertising campaign is by no means easy to pull off, and learning to successfully manage a PPC advertising campaign takes time and experience, so be prepared to put the hours in.
Tracking your Progress
Along with being able to try multiple strategies and experiment with new tactics, the ability to track previous campaigns and use analytics tools provides you with important insight into how your PPC budget is being used. For example, you will be able to work out your buyer volume so that your PPC budget can be brought in line. Perhaps spending $2000 brings in a return of $5000, and $5000 brings in $10000, but when you jump to $20000 you’re only getting a return of $15000. Being able to keep track of your PPC results lets you keep control and mould a successful method of PPC advertising for your specific business.
Getting the Best from Both SEO and PPC
Two such important parts of internet marketing should be regarded in equal measure. Each requires a different approach, but one without the other will impact on eithers effectiveness. Keeping in mind these points when managing an internet marketing campaign will help you get off to a great start.
SEO
- A website built with SEO as a key component.
- Regular blogs or news stories with content that your customers will want to read.
- A link building campaign that targets potential customers as well as connecting you to trustworthy websites.
- A pro-active approach that takes into account changing paradigms within SEO.
PPC
- Adapt your advertisements to target only potential customers.
- Keep the taps on to your PPC budget to keep traffic landing on your site.
- Know your buyer volume and don’t overspend.
- Experiment to find the best ROI.
Remember, for the most success with& SEO and PPC, work with their strengths to cover each of their weaknesses.