How SEO and Paid Marketing Work Together

There is an old adage that says, “one hand washes the other,” and it could not be more true when it comes to using more than one marketing strategy to improve your traffic and sales. Many business owners make the mistake of trying to market their business by using only one marketing channel, SEO for example. While it’s good to take advantage of SEO, the same cannot be said for putting all of a company’s figurative eggs into one basket. 

Instead, it’s wise to employ the use of several different forms of marketing. As a matter of fact, certain marketing mediums can work together, complement each other, and improve the overall effectiveness of a company’s digital marketing success.

Paid Marketing Can Improve SEO

There’s a reason why analytics are such an important tool when it comes to gauging the effectiveness of certain strategies. Take PPC ads for example. A company’s marketing team can carefully pour over the rankings of their PPC performance and choose ad text from their most successful ads. 

Then, the company can choose to rework the successful ad text into content that’s SEO-friendly (i.e.: a blog post that includes the chosen keywords). In this way, the company can gain twice the benefit from a single string of words. 

Additionally, the same text can be used to create strong SEO keywords that will help the company achieve higher search engine ranking.

Developing Multiple Traffic Routes

When it comes to making it to the front page of a search engine, any smart company would rather display two links to its website than only one. 

By using only SEO to reach the top of Google’s ranking system, a company might find itself nestled into one of the coveted search result listings that consumers are most likely to see. While this is great news, it’s only one listing. The same can be said when only using a single sort of paid marketing. The company’s ad might show up ahead of the organic search engine results, but it is still only one ad.

If a company has two listings displayed on the first page of search engine results, consumers are twice as likely to visit that specific website. For instance, if a targeted group of potential customers are looking for your products and services, but they actively avoid clicking on ads, a PPC is unlikely to be effective. Yet, if the company has an organic link listed on the first page as well, it may still earn a click.

The same can be said for consumers who are motivated by photographic ads. If the company only has an organic search engine listing advertising its products, the consumer might forgo it to click on a visually-appealing ad. 

It’s far more difficult to lose a potential customer when a company has reinforced its marketing strategy by branching out in several directions.

Social Media-Specific Visibility

Targeting an audience through paid marketing strategies can be very specific when it comes to finding unique groups on a variety of platforms. Whether a company is marketing through Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or any additional platform, a well-developed PPC campaign can locate and attract these audiences.

The benefit does not stop there, though, being that the data obtained through paid marketing is a treasure trove of information about customer demographics. Much like the way that PPC keywords can be transferred to SEO terms, the data can also be utilized to improve a company’s social media presence. By effectively using customer data, businesses can continue to draw in audiences across different social media platforms. 

Through spreading brand awareness via search engines, paid marketing ads, and social media content, a company can greatly widen the net used to attract viewers and convert them to happy customers.

Improve Your Local Presence

If a company hopes to develop a strong local presence, it may find itself playing the waiting game if it relies on search engine optimization alone. 

Because SEO takes time, paid marketing techniques can be a terrific partner to the company’s organic audience development. On one end, paid marketing techniques like PPC tend to show results in a shorter timeframe than organic SEO. On the other hand, paid marketing techniques have dedicated tools that aid in local presence development, like Google’s Local Campaigns.

Local Campaigns is a tool that allows business owners to advertise their companies via Google Maps as well as Google search and YouTube. Ads reach across several platforms and target local audiences in order to help customers find the businesses they’re interested in. In addition, these ads have high visibility to make local businesses easier to locate, making it simpler to attract local audiences in their target demographic.

Less is more in many scenarios but it is not the case when it comes to marketing strategies. It’s crucial for businesses to branch out and develop content for different marketing channels instead of relying on only one method of attracting and converting customers. Using several marketing techniques at a time is a great way to ensure that a business attracts as wide an audience as possible.