Why a Business Needs Both SEO and PPC

One of the classic misconceptions in the digital marketing world is that SEO and PPC are rival tactics, but while there are die-hard adherents in both camps, you could actually consider SEO and PPC to be two sides of the same very essential coin. Both methods leverage the power of search engines to garner targeted traffic, and they can complement each other quite well when used as part of a comprehensive search engine marketing strategy.

The best route to take is to develop an integrated approach that maximizes the strengths of each method. Below are some key points that will help shed some light on why your business needs both SEO and PPC.

1. Your visibility will increase.

If your website holds a prominent position in the organic search results, you’re definitely off to a good start, but you can boost your visibility by a large degree when you start running PPC campaigns in concert with your organic SEO efforts. This gives your site a double dose of exposure in the search results, and increases the credibility of your business in the eyes of the search engine users.

Not only that, but for mobile search results in particular, all of the listings “above the fold” are PPC ads, which means users have to scroll down in order to even see the organic results. If you don’t have a PPC presence among these top four or five search results, your site will get little to no visibility among mobile users.

2. Your quality score will improve.

It’s a well-known fact that optimizing your website for organic SEO typically increases its quality score for paid search. A site that has been properly SEO’d usually exceeds the requirements necessary to garner a high quality score, and this can save you a significant amount of money in terms of cost-per-click.

3. You’ll develop a more comprehensive list of high-performing keywords.

One of the main benefits of organic SEO is that it will uncover dozens of those super-valuable “long-tail” keywords that most PPC keyword tools tend to miss. Long-tail keywords are highly specific, lower-volume words and phrases that people use in their search queries when they’re really trying to find something in particular.

For example, if you sell golf equipment online, you could crank up a PPC campaign using high-level generic keywords such as “golf clubs” or “men’s golf clubs,” but if your organic keyword data shows that someone found your site through the search query “left-handed Ping golf clubs,” now you’re dealing with a user who is looking for something very specific.

More often than not, it’s these types of long-tail keywords that reveal a more concrete intention to purchase, and they tend to perform far better in terms of conversions than their generic counterparts. Expanding your PPC keyword set to include closely-related long-tail keywords and phrases will give you a decisive edge over the competition.

4. You can insulate your business against algorithm updates.

Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for a website to lose its ranking in one of Google’s periodic algorithm updates, which can negatively impact conversions and revenue. Search engine marketers like the ones at 2060 Digital can recognize when your site’s ranking has dropped for certain keywords, and then deploy a PPC campaign in order to plug in the gaps until the organic search results get back to normal, meaning your site never leaves the top of the results pages.