Search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) marketing are powerful traffic drivers in their own right. Each one attempts to get users onto a website by linking them, either through an ad or a search result. Companies such as Yeah! Local use these techniques extensively to help their clients become more noticeable. But how does a website utilize both of these technologies to their benefit? One is focused on ad delivery, and the other relies on search engine results and rankings to get noticed. While they share a purpose, combining them can set a business up to become very visible.
How do PPC and SEO Work Together?
It all comes down to the data. SEO and PPC together both generate vast amounts of data that, until now, were very difficult to mesh with one another. However, the integration of SEO and PPC results has become a lot easier in recent years. Unfortunately, many businesses don’t take full advantage of the opportunities that combining this data can offer them. Using a data management platform, you can first collect the relevant fields from your SEO data, such as:
· Organic CTR
· Average search ranking position
· Organic impressions on users
Next, you should get the PPC metrics you need to focus on, such as:
· CTR
· CPC
· Conversion data
These data points can then be combined to offer insights into areas that can be improved. Using visual data, such a scatter graphs make it easy to spot anomalies such as keywords with high CPC but low organic visibility. This data is only as good as the insight the business has into how to use it.
The Looming Problem
With the massive economic issues plaguing the world today, businesses have started cutting allowances to marketing budgets. Statista noted in March 2020 that as much as 61% of companies expected that they would need to cut budgets in the coming year. Unfortunately, the first department that gets hit with severe budget cuts is usually marketing. This reality means that businesses will have to be smarter about spending their advertising budget and put more emphasis on finding the best value for money.
Using Data to Inform Budget Decisions
By leveraging the data we got by combining our data from PPC and SEO, we can look at what keywords give us the best results for our spending. Ideally, the keywords that offer high performance with little budget investment. The opposite is also useful information. Keywords that cost more than they’re worth can be suspended from the paid advertising budget, making it much easier to see where cuts need to occur.
Data Can Help a Business With Challenges
This example is only one of the ways that combining PPC and SEO data can set about helping businesses deal with a changing economy. There are several other ways companies can leverage this data. We can use this data to look into what ad copy uses these keywords and how those ads perform to inform us which keywords are worth investing in. Moz mentions several scenarios that PPC and SEO data are better when combined. Maybe it’s time you started looking into how to bring these disparate data sets together to benefit your budget without impacting your marketing strategy.
