The Art of Combing PPC and SEO
There is a battle out there. Some winning; others losing. There is only one way to fight this battle. In fact, it could be classified as a war with many battles. The truth is, the winners will grasp a specific concept…and the losers (or to be nice, the ones who don’t win) will continue down the path of isolationism.
What am I talking about?
Well, some call it doing two things at once, multitasking, focusing…pick your flavor. The truth is, Internet marketers sometimes make the mistake of battling over PPC & SEO. (Pay Per Click & Search Engine Optimization).
Of course you may find one more cost effective over the other, but there shouldn’t be a struggle combing the two together. It’s not a “if you chase both rabbits you catch neither” type of concept. Both are capable of acting as useful compliments:
- It’s All About the Master Keyword List: Just like in school, you have to do your homework. Even though the details of launching a PPC campaign are different than optimizing for SEO, the root of search engine marketing still applies: keywords. Use free services like the Adwords Keyword Tool, or the one available over at SEO Book, to start building your list.
Let’s say you have an existing PPC campaign, and you want to start running SEO. It’s OK to use PPC keywords as the basis for the organic campaign, however, this list should be much longer….as it will include the long tail of your keywords and phrases. In the case of an e-commerce site, you should have keywords based on every available product. General and long tail.
- Organization & Prioritization: Regardless of whether you are transitioning from PPC to SEO or vice versa, it really doesn’t matter…your keywords should still be prioritized. When working with an SEO or PPC firm, they will always ask you what “25 or 50 keywords” you wish to target. As they say, it’s not wise to shoot from the hip. More specifically, when moving from SEO to PPC, you want to get the monthly search volumes which are available with the tools I mentioned earlier. You can afford to be a little bit more lax when dealing with SEO. However, with PPC, every click you get will cost money; it’s important to prioritize which keywords and phrases you’ll be shooting for.
- Important Aspects to Observe: If you are running neither PPC or SEO, and want to get started I recommend launching the PPC campaign first. Of course, as long as search engines are visiting your site, SEO is always taking place. But when it comes to launching full scale campaigns, it’s wise to collect PPC data before going head first into SEO. Consider the following:
- Keywords which do well in your PPC campaigns, may also do well for SEO once dominated by your pages.
- If a high volume keyword is too expensive to bid on for PPC…you can always optimize for it in the search engines.
- If you would like to stop bidding on a keyword in PPC, you’ll be able to slowly transition traffic from paid to organic sources.
- If a keyword which is targeted towards your business has a low quality score, I would recommend finding a way to work it into the SEO campaign.
- Also, if competitors are constantly outranking you (this may be due to several factors: budget, quality score..etc), there is no reason, over time, you can’t win the SEO war.
Like I said before, it doesn’t matter if you’re running PPC, doing SEO…or none of the above. The ability to smoothly transition from one to the other should not be difficult. And, of course, it’s a war you can WIN.
