5 Ways an Integrated SEO PPC Strategy Will Benefit Your eCommerce Business

A Separate SEO PPC Strategy Reduces Marketing Effectiveness

The debate over the relative marketing effectiveness of search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has raged for years and will likely continue for years to come. The truth is that each is an important component of a sound search strategy.

More important, far from being at odds with one another, SEO and PPC are 2 sides of the same coin. Each providing useful intelligence to inform and enhance the other.  The ancillary benefits of such an integrated strategy are several. For example, combining SEO and PPC on average yields:

• 90% more clicks;
• 40% more site visitors; and
• 44% more conversions

Neil Patel, in How to Achieve Multichannel Success by Integrating SEO and PPC, confirms the benefits of this approach:

“It’s only logical to embrace the change and interact with your audience through a multi-channel strategy that integrates a PPC campaign with an SEO campaign. It’s a great maneuver to gain visibility and authority, in the eyes of your customers. And, you simultaneously reduce your customer cost per acquisition.”

Far too many marketers run their SEO and PPC strategy efforts independently of one another.  In some cases, this occurs in-house, with separate marketing teams assigned to SEO and PPC. In other cases, businesses hire separate digital agencies, each responsible for managing one or the other.  That’s generally a mistake because in doing so, companies lose the benefits of a unified strategy, including the following 5:

1. Enhanced keyword intelligence

Using Google Analytics (or a similar analytics program), you can gather key metrics about the success of your search campaigns.  For example, you’ll discover which keywords have the highest conversion rates for both your SEO and PPC campaigns. You can use the keyword intelligence you gather on your SEO campaigns to improve PPC results and vice versa.

2. More effective (higher ranking) content

Some of your PPC ads will be more successful than others, resulting for example in higher conversions.  Your ad copy is among the factors which contribute to those higher conversions. You can use the copy which informs your most effective PPC ads to help you optimize content for SEO purposes.  For example, you could include some of that ad copy in title tags, meta descriptions and page content. Among the benefits of this approach is its immediacy—whereas measuring effectiveness by SEO alone typically takes a long time, your PPC results will available quickly.

3. Online reputation management

If someone posts a negative review of your business or otherwise harms your reputation, you should try to engage with them. In fact you should engage with the good reviews and comments too. When a customer comments or reviews, comment back. This is an opportunity to show that you as a business care about the opinions of those who use interact with your business. This also offers an opportunity to control or redirect a negative conversation. Engaging with comments or reviews also offers proof to those who see it that your business cares about all interactions.   

4. Social media marketing

Social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn possess extremely granular data about prospective customers.  You can use this data to create highly-targeted social media ads and use the business intelligence data you gather from those campaigns to inform your SEO strategy.

5. Organic keyword testing

Identifying the most effective organic keywords for your SEO strategy can be a challenge.  One way to get the business intelligence you need, quickly and accurately, is to test those keywords by using them in PPC ads.   You’ll quickly discover which keywords have the highest conversion rates. You can then prioritize those same keywords to enhance SEO.

SEO and PPC Strategies Need to Work Together

If you’re a marketer attempting to decide whether SEO or PPC is better for your business, you’re asking the wrong question.  You need to ask how you can use both to enhance the effectiveness of each. As Search Engine Land notes:

“In an ideal world, we would look at both SEO and PPC. They both have pros and cons and work best when supporting each other synergistically. Where you can get SEO and PPC working together, you will often be able to drive results that are greater than their component parts.”

To learn more about the ways our eCommerce solutions for Magento and our PPC, SEO marketing services to help boost sales and grow your eCommerce business, contact us today.

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