Search dominates the modern zeitgeist.
If you want to look up information on a topic, you search for it.
If you want to buy a specific product, you search for it.
If you’re facing a tough problem and you don’t know where to start, you search for it.
So it’s no wonder why search marketing and advertising have come to be the dominant strategies utilized by businesses to improve visibility, authority, traffic, and conversions.
Now, depending on who you ask, you might get one of two different answers for the best way to approach search marketing.
Some will insist that search engine optimization (SEO) is the best strategy.
Others will say it’s pay per click (PPC) advertising.
But the truth is, both of these strategies have incredible potential. And if you use them together in the right ways, you can see even better organic search results.
What exactly are the differences between these two strategies? How can you optimize your approach to each? And how can you use them together to even greater effect?
Before we delve into specific strategies and tactics you can use to harness the full potential of both search engine optimization (SEO) and PPC ad’s, let’s talk about the basics of these Digital marketing and advertising campaigns or PPC Campaign.
SEO Is all about increasing your organic rankings in search engines results pages (SERPs). Google and other search engines use a variety of ranking factors to determine which web pages to rank for a certain query and how to order them. If you can learn how to manipulate these ranking factors, you can increase your rankings, thereby making your webpages more visible in organic searches and attracting more traffic in the process.
Some of the most common tactics for this include developing robust onsite content, improving technical factors like loading time and site security, and building offsite links. It’s a long-term strategy that takes many months, and sometimes years to fully develop.
With PPC, you’ll use Google Ads and similar platforms to bid on and ultimately place advertisements above the fold in SERPs. There are also PPC ads on other platforms, like social media sites, but for now, we’re going to focus exclusively on search engines PPC ad’s.
You can control almost every variable in this process, choosing which keywords you want to display for, the audiences you want to target, and how much you’re willing to spend on this PPC campaign. However, the cost of this strategy goes up based on competition, so if you’re competing with many big businesses, this can get expensive fast.
That said, PPC advertising management is one of the most reliable ways to generate traffic, since you’re only paying for the people who actually click on your ad.
So how can SEO and PPC work together?
There are a few different ways to look at this.
For starters, we should understand that both SEO and PPC have strengths and weaknesses. Many of these strengths and weaknesses are complementary, meaning that if we use these strategies together closely enough, they can cancel out each other’s weaknesses and play to each other’s strengths.
We can also see these strategies as individually optimized for different types of SERP coverage. Only by utilizing both will you be able to maximize your visibility in search engines results.
However, we should also address a common misconception here: SEO and PPC don’t work directly together by feeding off each other. It’s tempting to think that paying for Google ads for a specific keyword could increase your likelihood of ranking for that organic keyword, but this is not the case. Paid search ads don’t have any effect on your domain authority or your ranking potential, and ranking highly in search engines organically isn’t going to benefit your PPC campaign directly.
Now let’s take a look at the specific ways you can use organic search ranking and paid search ads together.
Always start by keeping a consistent brand voice. If you don’t have a voice already created for your brand, now is the time to create one. Too often, companies sharply segment their search engine optimization (SEO) and PPC teams, resulting in a fractured voice that users find confusing and disorienting. But you have to remember, your prospects and customers are going to be encountering your brand in multiple different contexts. If you want to build their familiarity and trust, all your Google ads and search rankings need to embody the same values and personality.
Don’t allow your Digital marketing teams to become siloed. Instead, share information across departmental barriers. Both your SEO and PPC teams will be collecting valuable information, such as traffic rates, behavioral patterns, demographic interests, and engagement rates. For example, you may learn that one specific keyword fetches a much higher conversion rate than another; you can then incorporate this keyword into organic content for your SEO campaign. But this type of maneuver is only possible if all your departments and all your team members are openly sharing information with each other.
Instead of thinking about your SEO and PPC goals as separate, start thinking about them as two branched paths toward the same end destination: SERP domination. Advertisements give you the opportunity to achieve more visibility than organic rankings In some contexts, but you’ll also have organic ranking opportunities where keywords are too expensive to justify a bid. If you harness the full potential of both, you can get more SERP coverage and make your brand visible to even more people.
Remember that there is no such thing as a perfect digital marketing strategy. SEO is extremely cost effective, but it’s also sluggish and time intensive. PPC, by contrast, is fast and reliable, but it’s also more expensive. To get the most value out of both strategies, you’ll need to play to their individual strengths, while minimizing weaknesses. One common manifestation of this is focusing on PPC ads while developing authority for specific organic keywords; you can start taking advantage of traffic streams immediately, while slowly building up your onsite optimization.
Search related strategies only work if you truly understand your audience. You need to understand who you’re targeting, what their values are, what their goals are, and even how they think, at least to an extent. If you blindly optimize or bid for keywords based on your own intuitions, you’re going to fail. You’re also going to fail if you attempt to cater to a generic, universal audience. More on that in our next point.
At least in the beginning, focus on targeting niche audiences, rather than general audiences. Optimizing content and advertisements for young men in college is far superior to optimizing content and advertisements for everyone in the country. There are several reasons for this. First, you’ll face less competition, which is advantageous in SEO and PPC; you’ll pay less money for ads and you’ll be able to climb rankings faster. Second, you’ll achieve more relevance, meaning you’ll be more successful attracting people to your website and converting them.
What level of awareness is exhibited by your target audience?
How does that level of awareness change throughout the buyer journey?
For example, your customer may start out not even having awareness that they have a problem. At some point, they’ll be aware that a problem exists, but they won’t have awareness of the solutions available for it.
Gradually, they’ll work through the later stages, eventually becoming aware of products like yours, then your specific product, then your brand.
Throughout this by your journey, you’ll find “hidden” keywords and phrases that reveal the searcher’s intent, like “slow air leak” or “why nobody is applying for a job.” Capitalize on these to improve your relevance and avoid the competition.
Local optimization is ideal for reducing competition and appealing to specific audiences. Even if your company operates on a national level, it can be helpful to target some local terms. This is true for both SEO and PPC; local ads are cheaper than national ads, and you can optimize your website faster for local terms than national ones. Use localized landing pages and other localized content to fully capture the local audiences you target.
Keep your finger on the pulse. Don’t assume that your target audience is going to continue following the same trends and exhibiting the same behavioral patterns indefinitely. One of the best ways to do this, in addition to measuring and analyzing traffic on your site, is to analyze search trends. Which terms are rising in popularity? Which ones are falling? How is user intent evolving?
When targeting specific keywords for SEO or PPC, most marketers rightfully target words that are high in volume and low in competition, maximizing the number of people who will see the advertisement or onsite content piece while minimizing the number of competitors aggressively appealing to it. This is usually a good strategy, allowing you to improve cost effectiveness and avoid wasting time period however, you should avoid “keyword traps” that looked good on paper, but won’t lend much value to your business. These keywords may be high in volume and low in competition, but they aren’t relevant to your central business or your target demographics.
One of the shortfalls of SEO it’s the amount of time it takes to generate momentum for a website. Even if you invest heavily, writing tons of valuable content and building new links every week, you may not see initial ranking progress for several weeks or months. It’s going to take even longer to achieve a steady stream of heavy traffic. One of the best ways to close the gap here is to invest in PPC ads as a shortcut for immediate visibility; as long as you’re willing to pay for them, you can start generating traffic right now.
The flip side of this is that PPC ads are ephemeral; as soon as you stop paying for them, they disappear. If you want to have a more lasting impact, you need to establish pages of your website as intrenched, powerful content centerpieces. SEO is far better for this purpose. Use SEO to optimize pages of your website for evergreen keywords you expect to be relevant and valuable for the foreseeable future.
Competitors can be brutal, paying to rank for your branded keywords or completely taking over a niche you thought was exclusively yours. These aggressive maneuvers are easy to spot, but only if you’re paying attention to recent changes in relevant SERPs. Accordingly, you should employ ongoing competitor monitoring, taking notice of any major activity and responding accordingly.
Oftentimes, marketers and advertisers get lost in the idea of improving brand visibility and generating more traffic. But what do you do with that traffic once it hits your website? You’ll need to provide a powerful first impression and maximize user attention and interest to get more value out of each of these strategies. Fortunately, you can double dip with some of your assets, using them for both your SEO and PPC campaigns. One of the best examples of this is unique landing pages, which you can create for specific types of visitors and audience segments. Funnel all relevant traffic from organic searches and paid ads to landing pages that are relevant for the searcher.
Google is the first name that comes to mind when most people think about SEO or PPC. But Google isn’t the only option for paid advertisements, nor is it the only search engines people use regularly. Bing, DuckDuckGo, Facebook, and YouTube are other search engines, platforms, and media outlets worth considering as part of your strategy. Google gets all the attention because it’s by far the most popular search engines, but that also means it attracts the most competitors. Don’t be afraid to branch out.
People generally respond much better to visual content than written content, so include visuals whenever you can. This is one area where PPC ads are favorable; you can add images to an ad to make it pop. It’s also possible to optimize pages of your website with images and videos, but it can be tricky to make sure they become visible in SERPs.
You may be interested in SEO to improve the visibility of your brand and boost consumer awareness. There’s nothing wrong with this, but if you want to milk as much value out of the strategy as possible, you should optimize SEO for clickthrough rates. In other words, you should see your SEO strategy as only being truly valuable if people are clicking on your webpage and visiting it. Optimize for keywords that align with user search intent and improve your titles and descriptions to attract more traffic. This isn’t usually a problem with PPC ads, since you won’t be paying for people who don’t click your links.
There’s significant room for experimentation in optimizing paid search. You have control over all the variables, you can conduct AB tests quite easily, and you can delve into reporting and analytics to figure out exactly how your ads performed. This makes the PPC ad world a perfect testing ground for headlines, keyword selection, descriptions, and audience positioning. Take full advantage of this and learn lessons about your competitive environment if you want to make the most of both PPC and SEO.
SEO success is highly dependent on your ability to create excellent content and get people to pay attention to that content. But even if you’re an excellent writer, it can be hard to get your work noticed. PPC ads could be the perfect jump start, giving you a guaranteed stream of traffic and introducing hundreds, or even thousands of people to your latest work. From there, you’ll likely find it easier to attract links and inspire more user engagement.
PPC ad extensions are useful, additional pieces of information associated with the ads you place. They could serve to educate, direct, or inspire your target audience, providing details like the location of your business, opportunities to place a call directly, and more. Take full advantage of these; it’s a prime opportunity to immediately engage with prospective customers, rather than merely sending them to your website.
Automate whatever you can. Both SEO and PPC ads require at least some manual effort and human attention, but there’s much you can systematically implement to run in the background. These are both demanding strategies that could potentially monopolize your time, so employ shortcuts and time savers like automation whenever you can.
Are you working with limited experience or a limited team?
Don’t worry. We’re here to help.
We have the team members, resources, knowledge, and expertise to take your PPC campaigns to the next level. Contact PPC.co for a free proposal today!
Developing an effective bid strategy is one essential aspect of your Pay Per Click (PPC) ad campaign.
Google offers ‘smart campaigns’ but devising a click-and-go advertising or PPC campaigns that actually works is still a fantasy.
So, having success with your manual bidding or automated bidding largely comes down to your strategy.
Of course, bid strategies are more complex than years ago and there are more features to consider.
As much as Google tries to make our lives simpler with automated bidding, you will still need to do your research.
Below is more information about bid strategy and when to increase your PPC bid.
The perfect way to begin your Google Ad bidding journey is to use everything Google puts at your fingertips.
And that starts with the Keyword Planner.
This wonderful free tool will help you find new long tail keywords you didn’t consider – and it gives you a suggested bid based on how you set your advertising account.
Many experts recommend beginning viewing by looking at every keyword’s page 1 bid. Then maybe increase it by 25% to get to the middle of the page/landing page.
This will ensure your PPC ads are more visible but aren’t at the top of the heap (which will greatly increase your ad appears expenditures).
Let’s take a close look at several of the most popular automated or manual bidding strategies:
This is a popular Google Ad Manual or automated bidding strategy that can boost your conversions while focusing on a specific desired result on the home page. If your goal is to reduce costs to generate more sales, Target CPA is a worthwhile choice.
That keyword that costs less per click doesn’t always mean it’s superior to one with a higher manual CPC bidding.
Additional site traffic at a lower CPC will not necessarily net your firm more money.
Return on Ad Spend is also a great automatic bidding strategy that will help you reach the desired ROI.
With ROAS, you set your eyes on a certain dollar amount from total sales and not how many items your customers purchase. This is a useful method for products that cost more.
ROAS will adjust your strategy automatically and is based on your desired outcome or goal. Google will utilize conversion data from old PPC campaign to estimate possible conversion chances in the future.
This is an automated Google Ad strategy. It means the site uses AI to increase conversions and their values in your digital marketing campaign. Google looks at signals during the auction, including OS, device location, time of day, and more to boost your conversions.
Many marketers say Maximize Conversion’s can be best if you already have some conversion history in the books. But it’s not essential. Note, however, that this method could increase your costs a lot if the average spend is below the average daily budget.
This is like maximizing conversion’s is similar to Maximize Conversions. But the focus is on clicks, obviously. This can be what you want to drive prospects to your new website, so it works well for building audience and brand awareness. If your site doesn’t have conversion tracking set up, this strategy will set ad bids/adjust bids/manage bids to get as many clicks as possible.
It’s generally considered prudent to raise your bids when you can net the most profitable traffic from the keyword. And you should probably lower your PPC bid when you can get traffic that converts but it’s too expensive.
Some additional factors regarding when to raise and lower bids:
Further, if your company goal is to reduce your cost per action or CPA, you should allow the keyword-level CPAs to tell you when to raise or lower your bids. Naturally, what you do will be different based on the keyword, but here are some guidelines:
If the CPA for a keyword is below your goal and is showing a lower ad position, many say to increase the bid. This boosts your ad higher on the page. Then, you have better advertisement visibility and additional clicks and conversions.
However, if the keyword has a higher CPA and is still in a top position, think about lowering the bid. Fewer conversions will be the result but it will reduce your CPAs.
Now that you know when it makes sense to raise your ad bid, let’s review how you figure out which bid strategy is best:
Establishing a Google Ad bidding strategy and knowing when to increase or decrease bids is complex.
That’s why many growing companies turn their PPC advertising strategy and campaign to a skilled and experienced contractor.
Need help with Google Ads management? Contact us, we can help!
Your brand is your company’s identity.
It’s a keystone for most of your marketing and advertising strategies.
At the center of every message you send, every advertisement you display, and every new marketing tactic you try is going to be your brand name, big and prominent.
Despite this, people commonly neglect branded terms when practicing search engines optimization (SEO). Traditionally, SEO strategies focus on commonly searched keywords and phrases, as well as phrases that cleanly reveal user search intent.
For example, you might optimize for phrases like “good pancakes near me” or “auto repair shop Austin.” No branded keywords are necessary here, because you’re intentionally generating a list of brands to consider in your forthcoming purchase.
But if you want to get more value out of your SEO strategies, and earn even more valuable conversions, you need to start optimizing for branded search.
What exactly does this mean? And how can you do it?
First, what makes a conversion valuable?
On some level, all conversions are valuable.
In case you’re not familiar with the term, a conversion is just a meaningful action taken by one of your users. Depending on your organization and your strategy, a conversion could be a product purchase, a newsletter signup, or an interaction with a meaningful piece of optimize existing content on your own website.
Conversions will either give you revenue immediately or represent one step on the journey to getting revenue.
Our claim is that branded keyword and branded searches give better conversions, so what do better conversions look like?
Ultimately, branded searches are good for your conversion strategy for a few different reasons:
Branded search optimization, the practice of optimizing your website specifically for branded keywords, offers some other benefits as well:
Are there any weaknesses associated with branded search optimization?
The short answer is yes, but most of them present opportunities for compensation.
Now to the heart of the matter.
How do you optimize for branded search?
How can you make sure you remain competitively dominant in the landscape of branded search terms relevant to your brand name?
Is your brand in need of further online marketing support? Is there a missing ingredient in your existing branded search engines optimization (SEO) strategy? You’re in the right place: SEO.co is here to help. Contact us for a free consultation today!
No matter how much experience you have running pay-per-click (PPC) ads, a checklist will help you manage your time.
Trying to manage your responsibilities without a checklist can make you skip important tasks even when you’ve performed them routinely for years.
There’s a reason professionals in various industries use checklists – they work. Although the consequences for mistakes are more serious in other industries, checklists are the perfect companion for digital marketers.
Technically, you can’t manage time because it will go on whether you like it or not. We all have the same 24 hours in the day and that won’t change. However, you can manage your tasks within time and that’s what time management is really all about. In other words, it’s about managing your tasks within the boundaries of time.
Time management strategies vary, but they all fall back on the reliability of lists and written tasks. When you’re managing a PPC ad campaigns, time management matters. There are so many different components to set up, manage, and optimize, that if you don’t strictly manage your time and tasks, your campaigns will suffer.
The main purpose of a PPC audit checklist is to help you track recurring tasks within your PPC ad campaigns. Most of the time, you’ll have weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, and bi-monthly tasks. If you haven’t already organized your tasks into a schedule, this article will provide you with an outline to get you started.
Here are some common weekly PPC tasks to add to your PPC audit checklist:
If your projections indicate that you’re going to overspend, decrease your keyword bids and/or budgets. If your conversions are lacking, adjust your keyword bids or put all of your PPC budget into your highest performing campaigns.
Also, check to see if your campaigns exclude site categories where you don’t want your Google ads to run. For example, you may not want your Google ads to run on sites with content related to sexually suggestive content, sensitive social issues, or in-game placements on mobile apps. Many advertisers exclude mobile apps completely because they tend to eat ad budgets due to lower click and conversion rates.
Here are some common bi-weekly PPC tasks to add to your checklist:
This data will help you stop running google ads that don’t perform well and add new ad variations to see if you can beat your control for your highest-performing Google ads.
Don’t forget to check in on your retargeting/remarketing ads. And if you haven’t started running these better-performing ads yet, it’s something to seriously consider.
Studies have shown that using remarketing ads generate a higher ROI because they bring back potential customers that didn’t convert the first time. Many people who come back to a brand through remarketing end up converting.
Here are some common monthly PPC tasks to add to your checklist:
Check your account to ensure you’re targeting the right google search network, devices, languages, locations, and any other specific demographics you have set.
Hopefully, you’ve been testing different landing pages with your ads. If so, run a Final URL report to identify underperforming landing pages and send your traffic to the pages that are converting better. Then, look at your landing pages to see if you can identify why they’re not performing as well. Continue your split testing by creating more landing pages based on the ones that perform the best and keep testing your page elements.
Here are some common bi-monthly PPC tasks to add to your checklist:
When you identify locations that aren’t performing well, add negative keyword modifiers to eliminate untargeted or ineligible clicks. Then, add positive bid modifiers on your locations that are performing well.
As you can see, there are plenty of tasks to perform on regular schedules in order to keep your PPC ad campaigns running optimally. By creating your PPC setup checklist, you’ll be giving yourself a valuable tool that will keep track of your tasks better than your memory.
Countless studies have proven that human memory is unreliable, especially when it comes to details. This is seen most clearly in experiments designed to determine eyewitness reliability. In these experiments, witnesses struggle to remember basic things like the color of a suspect’s clothing, their height, and even their physical features.
Don’t rely on your memory to manage your PPC ad campaigns. While you might be able to remember some things, you’ll never remember everything. Additionally, having a checklist makes your job easier because you can simply go down the list and check things off as you complete each task.
Having a list also makes it easier for you to ad scheduling your tasks in your calendar and set those tasks as recurring items. Having a to-do list is great, but if you don’t also schedule your tasks you’re likely to skip important things.
Running a PPC campaign takes a lot of work and isn’t really suited as a one-person job. If you want big results from your PPC ads, you need a team to manage your PPC campaign.
Less than 25% of PPC search ads produce conversions, but that’s because most campaigns aren’t properly set up or optimized. When you work with us, we’ll get you the results you want.
We work with businesses in a variety of industries to create effective PPC campaigns that drive leads and sales. We’ll not only create effective ad copy, but we’ll also optimize your landing pages with effective ad copy. This is where most people get PPC ads wrong. A high click-through rate is only worthwhile when your landing pages convert. We’ll make sure your CTR improves along with your landing page conversions.
If you’re ready to take your PPC campaigns to the next level, get in touch with us and tell us about your goals. We’d love to help you generate the impressive results you’re after.
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