Understanding PPC and SEO
Businesses that have a strong online presence are tremendously more successful than those who do not. It’s no secret that in this day and age, your business needs to be found online. Creating a website is the first step, but appearing on search engines and advertising your website can be a completely different story. We’ll break down the terms of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which is the art and science behind digital marketing and the strategies to be found online.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is the paid portion of search engine marketing. The great thing about PPC advertising is that everyone has an equal opportunity. You can create a website today and be on the top search results as early as tomorrow, competing with websites that have been around for twenty years. The downside of PPC advertising is that you need to pay money for this traffic, and depending on how competitive your industry is, PPC advertising could be very expensive. These are also various digital platforms to utilize PPC campaigns; most notably: Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook Ads, which is what we here at Adzedia specialize in.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the organic aspect of search. SEO can also be referred to as “earned” advertising, because it is something that is organic and improves with longevity and constant optimization. Gaining high ranking using SEO can take a great deal of time and knowledge of the best SEO practices. There are many different strategies for SEO, but the most recent SEO best practices is making sure your website is mobile-friendly, has clean code, and has other relevant websites linking back to your website. Setting up social media profiles with the same domain name has also proved to provide positive results in SEO.
PPC and SEO are best used when practiced together. It’s a smart approach to utilize paid search while also steadily working on your organic SEO strategies. An example of this would be to advertise online with Google AdWords to get immediate traffic to your website, but also to focus on your SEO strategies. Running PPC campaigns gives you an opportunity to test different ads, keywords, and landing pages for a short time to see what your customer responds best to, as well as what generates the most conversions. Because the results are much quicker, it can give you clear-cut answers on the strategies that work the most effectively.
Both PPC and SEO utilize keywords, so essentially, you can share these keywords and focus on the same search results. An ideal situation would be to gain organic ranking for a specific keyword and be able to stop that same keyword on a PPC campaign. As mentioned before, it is a good strategy to analyze the conversions rates from the PPC keyword to implement them in SEO strategies. Using the data from PPC campaigns will save much stress and time in the future as you work on your SEO strategies, while allowing you more time to focus on your website, social media, and other aspects of your business.
ADZEDIA runs pay-per-click campaigns for many different industries. For more information on PPC, please contact ADZEDIA at 800-401-3590.