If you struggle to get potential customers to your website, you’re not alone. Marketing is an integral part of business, but deciding which route will benefit your business the most can be challenging.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimisation (SEO) are two marketing strategies you would’ve encountered before. One involves a money investment, and one a time investment. However, while they work fine independently, can they be used together to bring customers to your website?
This article will discuss PPC and SEO, how they work, and answer, “Does pay-per-click help SEO?”
What is Pay-Per-Click?
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a common online marketing tool that allows businesses to run ads on a platform, such as Google Ads, and pay a fee every time someone clicks on it.
You would’ve seen PPC in action before. Every time you type something into Google, the first few results usually have ‘Ad’ next to them. This is an example of PPC in action.
Businesses use PPC to drive traffic, sales or enquiries from their target audience. Common PPC platforms, such as Google Ads, allow you to target the people you want. For example, if you want to target females aged 25-30 who are mothers and live in a particular area, you can do just that.
So, how does PPC work on Google Ads?
- Create an account on the platform
- Create ads (select the targeting by adding keywords and audiences)
- Set the maximum cost you’re willing to pay for each click
- Your ad then goes into an auction with other advertisers bidding on the same keywords
- The auction then determines the order in which the ads are shown
- You only pay when someone clicks your ad
Although there is a range of different ads (shopping ads, display ads, search ads), the main principle remains the same.
Benefits of pay-per-click
If you’re considering utilising PPC as a part of your marketing strategy, here are some benefits you can expect.
- You start receiving clicks almost immediately
After you set up your pay-per-click account and create an ad, you have to wait for it to be approved. However, it only takes a few hours to be approved.
Once your ad has been approved and is live, granted, you’re eligible to appear in the auction, and your bid is high enough, you’ll start appearing at the top of search results.
Compared to SEO, PPC allows you to see returns very quickly. This is one of the main reasons businesses choose to go down the PPC route.
- It can be tracked and measured easily
All popular PPC platforms, such as Google Ads and Bing Ads, allow you to track conversions. They also let you see the ROI of the overall account and specific ad groups and keywords.
By tracking and measuring your campaigns, you can tweak them to increase the ROI over time.
- You are in complete control
One of the main benefits of pay-per-click advertising is that you can control how long your ads run for and how much you pay.
Do you need to pause your ads temporarily, or do you only want to run them to generate new leads? You can easily do so with PPC. However, the best-performing campaign does not get turned off and on constantly.
You also have control over how much you spend (daily or monthly) and how much you pay per click. If your budget is $50 per day and you want to increase it to $70, you can do it with a click of a button.
How does pay-per-click help SEO? Continue reading to find out.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimisation, or SEO, improves your website to increase its visibility on search engines.
The better your pages' visibility in search results, the more likely they will be found and clicked on. The main goal of SEO is to help attract website visitors who will become customers or an audience that keeps returning to your website.
In fact, 60% of marketers say that SEO is their highest quality source of leads.
So, how does search engine optimisation work?
Search engines like Google and Bing use crawlers (sometimes called bots or spiders). These crawlers scour the web to gather information about all the content they can find. For example, a crawler will crawl through your website to try and determine what the content is. Once it has done a thorough search throughout your website and determined what it’s about, you will start showing up for that type of content. For example, if you have a motorcycle dealership in Brisbane and your content focuses on that, your website will show up for keywords relating to your industry.
Benefits of SEO
If you’re considering utilising SEO as a marketing strategy, here are some of the most popular benefits:
- It’s free!
The most popular benefit of using SEO to bring traffic to your site and business is that it’s free! However, while it can take much more work and time for your content to rank higher, you don’t have to pay to maintain your top spot.
- It produces long-term results
Although it might take between six to 12 months for you to rank highly on search engines, you will maintain your position (or similar positions) for years to come.
- It helps you get high ROI and conversions
SEO can account for a considerable chunk of your website’s traffic, which essentially means there can be more conversions. Whether you want visitors to purchase something or subscribe to your newsletter, SEO paves the way for it all.
Does Pay Per Click Help SEO?
So now that you know more about the two marketing strategies, does pay-per-click help SEO?
Ultimately, PPC and SEO are two sides of the same marketing coin. While they work great individually, they can work even better together.
Here are the benefits of PPC & SEO working together.
You can reach more people
One of the main benefits of PPC & SEO working together is that it allows you to reach more people.
SEO can help you attract and convert traffic from people who are already searching for your business or already know what you offer. On the other hand, PPC allows you to reach people who may not be familiar with your business but are searching for keywords related to what you offer.
By using PPC and SEO, you can reach more people, leading to more conversions than just using one of the two strategies.
You can discover more keywords
Researching and targeting keywords is a significant part of pay-per-click and SEO. You must target the right keywords to reach the right people and increase conversions.
Since SEO can take a few months to show results, it can be hard to tell if your keywords are effective. Luckily, PPC allows you to see immediate results, so you can look at which keywords drive the most traffic and which don’t.
By seeing keywords while doing PPC research, you can use those keywords in your SEO strategy to drive better results.
PPC creates brand awareness
How does pay-per-click help SEO? One of the main benefits of the two working together is that PPC creates brand awareness that leads people to click on your organic listings.
Since PPC ads are at the top of search results, people will click on your ad and either stay on your website or leave. While this may sound negative, people will still be aware of your brand after seeing it at the top of their search results.
However, when those same customers search for similar products or services in the future, they’ll remember your business. When this happens, they’ll be more likely to click on your organic search results over competitors.
Create a PPC and SEO Plan with Anchor Digital
So, does pay-per-click help SEO? Yes, it does!
While these two marketing strategies work great individually, you can reap even more benefits by utilising both.
PPC can help SEO in the way that it can create brand awareness, leading to more organic leads, it allows you to discover more organic keywords, and you can reach more people.
If you’ve been thinking about improving your marketing strategy for a while but don’t know where to start, look no further than Anchor Digital.
Not only are we an SEO agency, but we also specialise in PPC. Our team can work with you to create a marketing strategy that can see your traffic double within weeks of implementation.
If you’re interested in driving more traffic to your website and increasing conversions, let’s start a conversation today! Drop us a line to see how we can help you achieve your business goals.
