It’s an age-old digital marketing conundrum: are you better off putting your budget into SEO or pay-per-click (PPC)? It’s often said that, for those who are looking for a “quick win” and need to demonstrate a return on their investment as soon as possible, PPC campaigns are more effective, as you’re paying for immediate reach and traffic. SEO, on the other hand, is the “slow and steady” approach that, though may take a few months to get going, can prove more fruitful and allow you to enjoy long-term success on the search engine results pages.
However, if your budget allows, it could be worth investing in both SEO and PPC at the same time – in fact, running the two concurrently can yield a number of valuable benefits…
Perhaps one of the most obvious benefits of running a search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising campaign at the same time is that you can boost brand awareness quite considerably. Indeed, if you’re spending time working on your SEO, publishing high-quality content on your website and securing backlinks from well-respected websites, the chances are that you’ll be appearing organically for relevant search terms, whether that’s “top hats in London” or “whisky distillery in Dundee”. Add PPC advertising to the mix, and get another placement on those SERPs – effectively meaning you could dominate the top two spots. This not only boosts brand awareness (even when people don’t click on your page) but it reduces the chances of competitors appearing at the top of Google, and luring in your customers.
Another great reason to invest in SEO and pay-per-click marketing is that you can scale your business as soon as you’re ready to do so. With PPC, you can target warm leads who are looking to buy your products or services, and with SEO, you can target users’ pain points and prioritise your most popular products/services to climb the ranks organically, ensuring those customers who found you through paid methods will return using Google search. It’s also good to run the two marketing methods side by side so you can determine which is more lucrative – after six months of SEO and PPC, you might decide that you’re getting more back from your organic outreach and optimisation and pour all of your resources into that.
An added benefit of running PPC and SEO campaigns side by side is that you can learn a lot about your potential customers. As you start to see which paid ads are received best, and which keywords are attracting the most number of clicks or the lowest cost per click, you can use those keywords as part of your organic search engine optimisation, too. This will mean that you can, in time, reduce your reliance on paid search methods and climb to the top of the search engine results pages for those terms. Both Google and Bing offer powerful suites and tools for optimising your paid ad strategies, and the resources and data you can collect is worth more than any SEO tool. Before we move onto our next point, it’s worth noting that, according to an independent study from Varn, 57.5% of consumers don’t recognise Google ads, 34.8% recognise them but don’t use them, and 7.7% recognise ads and do click them.
Finally, it’s worth noting that an SEO and PPC campaign can work miracles if your company was to suffer from a disaster, such as a social media scandal, failed product launch, or perhaps even worse. With the right strategy, you can lean on PPC ads and SEO-optimised content to mask any negative stories or headlines, which can serve as a public relations activity. For instance, if you were to be featured on a television show such as BBC Watchdog and wanted to reduce the impact it had on your business, you could take out ad campaigns and blogger outreach to share your own side of the story and reduce the potential damage.
There you have it – just some of the benefits of running pay-per-click advertising campaigns and SEO strategies hand in hand. If you’re looking for help with either – or both – depend on the team at Zudu today. Click here to send us a message and arrange a free consultation.
