PPC + SEO — a powerful combo

Many of our clients have a question — what is better for promotion: simultaneous use of PPC and SEO, choosing one of the tools, or alternating?

In this article, we will consider the features of each method, compare and tell you how to benefit from paid advertising in tandem with organic promotion.

Does contextual advertising affect SEO?

Contextual advertising (or PPC — Pay-per-click) does not directly affect Contextual advertising (or PPC — Pay-per-click) does not affect SEO, but still indirectly affects organic promotion. To get the most out of your marketing, it's best to use both methods in combination with each other.

PPC advertising allows you to maximize the number of pages in search results

In combination with SEO, paid advertising helps your business take up more space on search results pages. If someone scrolls through your ad and goes to organic search results, they will also see a link to your website page. This way, your site can be seen more often by a new user, which will cause them to have some affection for your business.

PPC helps find valuable keywords for organic SEO

If you want to appear in more relevant search results, you need to set up targeting for correct keywords. PPC allows you to see immediate results (clicks for specific keywords), while SEO takes time to show results, making it somewhat difficult to immediately assess the effectiveness of keyword optimization. By running an ad, you can gauge whether users are interested in a new section of your site (or a new product). If they are going to click on it from an ad, it makes sense to create a page and use the exact words they clicked on in the ad for optimization.

PPC increases brand awareness, which encourages people to click on organic search results

While your ad is showing on your site, future users will remember your brand. As leads become more familiar with your business, they are more likely to interact and click on your site on other platforms in the future. This leads to increased traffic and conversions for your business. In this way, PPC advertising increases brand awareness, which can lead to organic search traffic.

PPC helps attract more local customers

Using PPC advertising in local search can increase the number of potential customers on your site. Many local searches are done on mobile devices, so PPC ads take up most of the screen, followed by Google My Business listings. Someone will see your PPC ad and either click on it or skip it. If users skip it, they will scroll down the page and see your business information in Google My Business. If they scroll through that, they can continue to find your site in organic search results. This is an opportunity to take up even more space on a single page of search results. It can also make the customer think that your local business is the best solution for them.

PPC is not just Google Ads

PPC advertising is not limited to Google search results. Social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have paid ads that you can run on the Google Ads platform. These ads will help you attract attention to your social media profiles. This affects brand awareness and increases organic brand traffic. The functionality of such platforms is wide and allows you to work not only with increasing brand awareness and increasing the loyal audience of pages but also redirect users who have left your site back, receive leads through lead forms or internal messengers of the platforms.

Make contextual advertising and SEO work for you

Since PPC and SEO have their own advantages, it is advisable to use both tools to get the maximum benefit from each. If the analysis of marketing channels (SEO and PPC) is done correctly, you can get the most out of attracting targeted traffic to your site, as well as increase its conversion rate.

Get rid of ineffective keywords

SEO involves much more than keyword research, and eliminating irrelevant keywords is an important part of the process. Implementing a PPC campaign shows you which keywords are not of interest to new visitors, allowing you to focus only on those that will be useful for getting results.

The presence of a site on the first page for some keywords can reduce the cost per click for these keywords for advertising. The ZOG Digital agency conducted a study on this issue:

Chart of the dependence of the cost per click on the presence of the site on the first page of the search results

Data source — link

“We see a clear performance boost when brands use both PPC and SEO. For example, after evaluating our book of business, we found that profiles that use PPC and SEO strategies have the highest click-through rates for both organic and paid search, as well as lower cost-per-click in paid search. Specifically, we categorized the data by keyword—we have keywords with active search ads, keywords with search optimization (organic ranking), and keywords with both tactics active.”

For non-branded keywords that have both paid and organic presence, the CTR was 8.93 percent for paid search and 5.10 percent for organic search across all positions. If we break down the tactics, the CTR for paid search is 8.08%, while organic search is 4.48%. Just by looking at these numbers, we can see that keywords that appear in both paid and organic results give a combined CTR boost.

The graph also shows the cost-per-click (CPC), where the average CPC for paid search is $2.06, while for keywords with organic presence, it is $1.18.

When analyzing this CPC decline, it was found that almost all paid keywords with organic presence have a higher Quality Score than paid keywords without organic presence. This could be a result of the higher CTR due to greater exposure to search results and/or richer content. This could also be due to the keyword relevance that was achieved on landing pages optimized for organic search. Regardless of why the PPC Quality Score is higher for overlapping keywords, there is a justification for employing a keyword strategy that includes both paid and organic tactics.

Keep a close eye on your competitors in search results

In AdWords , you can access the Auctions report. It allows you to evaluate the domains that are currently bidding on certain keywords. It also gives you an insight into your competitive landscape.

You can also use the Domain vs. Domain tool in SEMrush to analyze your competitors' visibility for search queries. There you can identify relevant keywords for which you should optimize your site pages.

Important! To win most of the auction, it is not necessary to always occupy the first position in paid search. For an effective strategy, you need to monitor the bids for your campaigns and compare them with the impressions above your competitors. If these results suit you, the chosen strategy is correct. If the efficiency is insufficient, you should review the bids, ads, and ad display schedule.

Conclusion

Although contextual advertising and search engine optimization are very different marketing tools and should occupy unique places in your digital marketing strategy, they do influence each other to some extent. Instead of seeing both as competitors for your attention and budget, you need to see them as channels for attracting targeted traffic that can complement each other.