directory

  • preface
  • First, what is SEO?
    • Page SEO
    • Outside the page SEO
    • Technical search engine optimization
  • What is PPC?
  • What is SEM?
  • Four, should you use SEO, PPC or both?
    • 1. Target ads to competitive keywords
      • A) You can generate income immediately
      • B) You can test and optimize the transformation
      • C) You can obtain valuable keyword data
    • 2. Use PPC and SEO to deliver a lot of advertising keywords
    • 3. Use SEO for message keywords
    • 4. Monopolize search results with SEO and PPC
  • Final thoughts

preface

Search engines like Google have two types of search results: paid search and natural search. When a company pays Google for a click, the paid results are displayed.

Natural results are the results that Google considers most relevant to the query.

Business owners can use SEO and PPC to appear in natural and paid results to increase site traffic.

In this guide, we cover when and how to use SEO, PPC or both to achieve a more comprehensive search engine marketing (SEM) strategy.

But first, let’s cover the basics.

First, what is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine optimization) is a method of optimizing content that can be found through the natural search results of a search engine.

Google and other search engines consider hundreds of factors when deciding which pages to rank. No one knows what all of these factors are, but the most important ones fall roughly into three parts:

Page SEO

Page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages.

Examples of page policies include:

  • Matching search intent
  • Discuss the topic in depth
  • Use short descriptive urls
  • Write attractive title tags and meta descriptions
  • Use descriptive Alt tags for images (if applicable)
  • Write content that is easy to read
  • Add keywords in important places

Outside the page SEO

Off-page SEO is anything done outside of a website to improve its ranking.

Examples of off-page policies include:

  • Get backlinks from relevant and authoritative websites
  • Earn brand mention
  • Architectural Citation *
  • Optimize your Google My Merchants list *
  • Win acclaim

Side note: Markup with (*) is critical for local business SEO.

Technical search engine optimization

Technical SEO involves making technical changes to help search engines crawl, index, and rank content more effectively.

Examples of technical optimizations include:

  • Improve page speed
  • Use standard tags to prevent duplicate content
  • Use the Hreflang tag to get multilingual content
  • Optimize robots.txt to improve fetching efficiency
  • “Noindexing” is thin

What is PPC?

PPC (Pay per Click) is a form of advertising in which businesses can pay for web site clicks from popular platforms such as search engines.

For example, clicking on this AD in Google costs Apple money:

What is SEM?

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is a broad term that covers BOTH SEO and PPC.

Side note: Not everyone agrees with this definition. Some people think SEM is a synonym for PPC.

Four, should you use SEO, PPC or both?

Knowing what we now know about search engine marketing, it’s easy to conclude that SEO is the way forward because natural traffic is free, consistent and passive.

Not always.

Sometimes SEO works best; Other times, PPC is a better choice. Sometimes it makes the most sense to use both.

Here are four ways to maximize search engine visibility and traffic using SEO, PPC, or both.

  • Target ads to keywords that are too competitive
  • Use PPC and SEO to deliver a lot of advertising keywords
  • Use SEO as a reference keyword
  • Use SEO and PPC to monopolize search results

1. Target ads to competitive keywords

Ranking certain keywords can take years.

For example, if you have a new supplement store and want to rank “buy protein powder,” your chances of ranking in the short to medium term are slim.

That’s because you’re competing with amazon, Walmart, and GNC.

But that doesn’t mean you should give up SEO and start advertising.

Because the ranking of competing queries can be long-lasting, there are some advantages to using PPC when ranking web pages.

A) You can generate income immediately

Paid traffic is instantaneous. Click the button to turn it on or off.

By sending traffic to relevant pages optimized for conversion, you can make a sale in minutes.

Remember, revenue is not the same as profit.

If you sell for $10, pay $1 per click, and convert at 20%, you’ll turn every dollar you spend into two dollars.

Advertising fee schedule

But if your product costs $6 to make, you lose money.

Advertising profit statement

There are two ways to solve this problem without increasing the price of the product:

Improving conversion rates lowers your COST per click (CPC) It can take months to achieve both goals, so be prepared to lose dollars when adjusting your AD series and pages to fit your job.

B) You can test and optimize the transformation

Most advertising platforms have conversion tracking capabilities. They know that if publishers see a positive return on their AD spending, they will keep spending.

Using this opportunity, you can gain insight into the average conversion cost per conversion and run controlled tests to improve conversion rates. When you start making money from advertising, expand to other platforms (such as Bing advertising).

C) You can obtain valuable keyword data

The “Search Terms” report in Google Ads shows the conversion data for the keywords you want to bid on.

Use it to find keywords with high conversion rates for SEO targeting.

For example, suppose you sell protein powder.

Bidding on popular keywords such as “protein powder” may generate a lot of clicks, but conversion rates are low. For more specific queries, such as “grass-fed whey protein,” you might get fewer clicks but more conversions.

Therefore, you can do the following:

Export search term reports from Google Ads, filter out profitable words, and paste them into Ahrefs’ keyword explorer to capture their SEO metrics. Next, sort by “keyword difficulty” to find the keywords that are easiest to rank organically.

2. Use PPC and SEO to deliver a lot of advertising keywords

Profitable keywords tend to attract a lot of advertisers.

Just check out the results for “Auto Insurance” :

Google shows four paid ads at the top, and their clicks decrease as natural search results are pushed down.

How many fewer clicks?

For that keyword, nearly 40 percent of the ads were paid.

So, PPC is a great way to get traffic from this keyword, but what about SEO?

If we look at the estimated natural visits to the current ranking page for this keyword, we see that it has an estimated 64,000 natural visits per month.

Bottom line: Invest in SEO and PPC to maximize traffic from keywords that are heavily advertised.

3. Use SEO for message keywords

Most Google searches are informational.

That means people want to learn, not buy.

For example, a query for “How to make a protein shake” yields 2,100 searches a month.

It is unlikely that anyone is looking for a market for protein powder here. Most people are probably looking to learn how to use the powder they’ve already purchased to make a delicious smoothie.

This explains why there is no supplemental company bidding for this keyword. It doesn’t make economic sense, even with low average CPC.

However, looking at the search results, we found a supplement company ranked organically at the bottom of the first page.

As is clear from the post’s title, this is no accident. They have tried to rank the keyword.

The question is, why are they willing to make the effort to rank organically, but not pay for clicks on a page?

The answer comes down to cost versus return.

The highest-ranked page for this keyword gets 9,000 natural visits per month. The estimated PPC value of this flow is $16,400.

Given the low keyword difficulty score for this query, it will almost certainly require less time and effort (in dollars) than natural ranking.

4. Monopolize search results with SEO and PPC

It’s not just advertising that degrades natural search results.

Google now shows SERP features such as featured clips, the “People also want to ask” box, and video rotation for certain queries.

This can be annoying when your goal is higher ranking, but keep in mind that it can show up in many SERP features.

See the query “How to rank YouTube Videos”. We appear in video clips, video rotations and near the top of the “blue Link” natural rankings.

This is true for many SEO related keywords, as we are committed to providing the best resources for learning SEO. We also optimized the video to rank it in Google.

Some brands choose to further monopolize search results by targeting ads to already-ranked keywords.

For example, one site is running ads about “how to create a blog” despite being organically ranked and having selected snippets.

Final thoughts

Search engine marketing (SEM) is not a never-ending competition between SEO and PPC. Knowing when and where to use each strategy to achieve the desired outcome is the game.

Sometimes SEO is the answer, sometimes PPC, and sometimes both.

Want to learn more about SEO? Check out SEO tutorials for beginners.