I talk with so many business owners and marketing managers who think they need to employ either an SEO strategy or a PPC strategy. Many are surprised when I tell them, Both! Here’s a little information on why I recommend merging these strategies.
I know you’ve all seen a McDonalds commercial. You’ve probably heard a radio ad and seen a billboard for them as well. If you’ve paid attention, you’ve noticed their message is the same across all those mediums. Why? It’s extremely effective. Any advertising expert will tell you, repetition is the key to brand awareness. It’s also possible that you aren’t reaching all your potential clients with just one medium. So by using all three, you are more likely to reach more of your target audience. So, what does this have to do your website search marketing strategy?
First of all, let’s consider the repetition. Let’s say a potential customer does a search and clicks on an organic link to your website (thanks to your awesome SEO efforts). They look around, read a few pages but don’t really do anything because they aren’t quite that far down the sales funnel yet. So, they leave. Sadly, you’ve got nothing. No contact information and certainly no inkling of who just browsed your website. Two or three months down the road, they do another search but this time, they click on a competitor’s website. Now, they are ready to commit. So, they fill out a contact form on your competitor’s website. Sadly, you’ve likely lost that lead. Now, let’s say in addition to your SEO, you also implemented a PPC remarketing strategy. That same customer who visited your website would have seen your ad on other websites they visited such as social media or news sites or maybe even their webmail page. So, guess what? Your brand stays top of mind. Two months down the road when they’re ready to move forward, they remember your company or may even click on one of your remarketing ads. This time, you have a real chance of converting them. Best of all, remarketing is pretty easy to set up. You just place a small snippet of code on your website and this allows you to track who visited your site so you can retarget them.
Another thing to consider is, even with the best SEO strategy, it would be rather challenging to optimize your site for every possible search variation. Additionally, the cost-per-click for some PPC terms might not fit in with your budget. The best way to tackle this is to analyze your data and determine where you need to focus on SEO. Then use PPC to fill the gaps. For example, let’s say you’ve analyzed your data and determined the phrase wedding cakes has a higher cost and a lot of competition. So, you focus on SEO for that term. After a few months, your hard work pays off and you are now ranking in the top 3 links for “wedding cakes”. That’s awesome! But what about all that other traffic you might be missing like graduation cake or baby’s first birthday cake. Grab that business! Set up a PPC campaign focused on those terms and you could potentially double or triple your website leads.
The third thing to consider is time. It can take up to several months to really see the fruit of your labor from a good SEO campaign. Thankfully, you can employ PPC to get some immediate gratification. The nice thing about PPC advertising is you can turn it on and off or even adjust the flow like a faucet. You have complete control. So, guess what, when you start seeing click-throughs from the SEO efforts, you can turn off that PPC campaign or target a new set of keywords with that budget.
Now you can see why your business could benefit from a combined SEO and PPC strategy. With just a little work, you can increase your website traffic and begin really growing your business.
It doesn’t stop there though. There are other digital marketing methods you can employ to drive traffic to your website including social media marketing, email campaigns and content marketing. Firefly loves implementing the perfect digital solution for our clients. Whether it’s PPC Management, web design or SEO, we can solve your digital marketing challenge. Contact us to learn more about how we can help your business with online advertising.