And what if we told you that with the right strategy, SEO and PPC can, as a team, attract more online traffic? Before we get into this anecdote let’s quickly walk through the pros and cons of both SEO and PPC to better understand what kind of strategy can be laid.
| SEO | PPC |
| SEO is more of an organic process and hence it might take more time and work to achieve Page 1 ranking. | Can instantaneously place your ad on page 1. |
| You don’t have to pay per click for an SEO campaign. | Cost per click varies from industry to industry. |
| It usually takes a few months to determine keyword performance. | It takes just 2-3 weeks to determine keyword performance. |
| Pick the right keywords and stick with them. | Filtering out what doesn’t work is seamless. |
| SEO is a resource exhaustive process when compared to PPC. | PPC Management is relatively quick and manageable. |
Having discussed about the aspects that might or might not work individually with SEO and PPC, there’s one obvious negative aspect of SEO- it takes too long to rank your keywords on page one. And if you strategize incorrectly by choosing the wrong keywords, you will have little or no ROI on your efforts. PPC, on the other hand, yields results in a 2-3 week time period.
So here’s the puzzling part, how do you make SEO and PPC work together?
It’s simple, actually.
Firstly, determine the budget. Don’t let your accounts burn with unyielding experimental budgets. Fix a said budget which you’re willing to spend on PPC for the first month of your launch. Once you have this, calculate the lifetime of True ROI for your existing clients [not generated through PPC].
True ROI is the amount you spent on acquiring a client and the ROI from this client over the lifetime of your sales cycle. This includes upsells, down sell etc.
The next step is to determine the number of leads you need to generate from your PPC campaigns on a monthly basis; and, of course, to generate a positive ROI. The campaign is not complete without the tracking. This tracking should lead you to the precise search terms which in turn leads you to a possible conversion or a purchase.
Now, the campaign is ready to go live. Run it for a period of 2-3 weeks while continuously making minor adjustments to decrease the cost per conversion. [The mentioned period varies from industry to industry based on the varying lengths of sales cycles.]
Once the 2-3 week period is complete, analyse your search terms to figure out what gave you the highest ROI. The PPC Search terms with the highest ROI are your SEO keywords.
And there you go; you have your SEO keywords from your PPC campaign. All that you will need to do now is begin the SEO process with these keywords. Once you begin to rank these keywords on page 1, you can allocate a lesser budget toward PPC.
However, it is highly recommended to continue advertising via PPC in order to capture the most number of leads. A PPC presence and an SEO presence for the same keywords increase the likelihood of your website in getting the click.
Having laid out our take on this highly misunderstood pairing, if you still feel overwhelmed with these concepts then, hey- we’re at your disposal! 😉
