Search Marketing InsiderPay Per Click, Social Media and SEO Strategies – An Internet Marketing Institute Publication

By Nick Herinckx, Account Executive, Anvil Media

Just like peanut butter and jelly, Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) belong together. When done correctly, integrating your PPC and SEO campaigns lead to substantial increases in conversions, a decrease in management costs and a healthy boost in ROI. But unfortunately, they are traditionally managed separately, often with separate goals, budgets and teams. By handling each campaign in a vacuum, managers hinder profitability and literally do the same work twice over.

We’re going to review how to integrate your PPC and SEO campaigns to get the most from your Internet marketing efforts.

Using PPC Keywords to Guide SEO Keyword Choice
One of the most harmful mistakes a company can make with their Internet marketing campaign is to separate their PPC keywords and SEO keywords. Now, PPC keyword research and SEO keyword research are definitely very different. With SEO, it’s important to consider organic competition, link profiles and domain trust while with PPC, ROI and paid competition is your guide. But remember this: SEO can take months while PPC results and data are almost immediate. Because of this, doesn’t it make the most sense to test out keywords using PPC before you spend months working to rank your pages organically? Let’s be honest, with most link building campaigns it can take months or more of hard work before you start seeing traffic, and link building isn’t exactly the most exciting aspect of Internet marketing. The last thing any company needs is to work for months, start ranking for a keyword and then discover that it’s not really profitable or targeted. For this reason, it’s very cost and time effective to test keywords using PPC before attempting to rank for them organically.

So how do you test keywords using PPC? The most important part is to ensure you have conversion tracking set up correctly. Regardless of integration, you need to be tracking your PPC conversions so you can accurately calculate ROI. It doesn’t matter what your conversion point is, as long as it represents one of the main goals for your website and as long as it doesn’t change throughout testing. Once you have conversion tracking established, simply create your PPC campaigns how you normally would and let them run for a month. At the end of that month, you are going to have a solid idea of which keywords perform the best and lead the most conversions. These are the keywords you should strongly consider for your SEO campaigns, as they have proven their profitability.

Using PPC & Landing Page Copy to Guide Website Copy
Most companies choose a target market and then develop messaging that best resonates with their audience. But even still, small copy changes and headline changes can have a dramatic impact on bounce rates and conversion rates. This is most evident with PPC ads, where you are able to see which ad text works best for certain keywords (leads to a high CTR) and which landing page headlines lead to the lowest bounce rate and highest conversion rate. Many companies will test PPC copy and implement results separately from the main website, and this a big mistake. If certain messaging resonates well with your PPC traffic, and the traffic is being generated from relevant keywords, then make absolutely sure you integrate that messaging into your main website. I did this with one of my own clients and saw organic bounce rates decrease 10% immediately after implementing the copy that worked well for my PPC ads.

Content Network Performance and Your Link Building Campaigns
Do you advertise on content networks? If so, then you should be monitoring the quality of the traffic coming from these campaigns and specifically, which websites drive that traffic. What often happens is that content network ads run on tons of sites and generate millions of impressions, but only a handful of those sites will be the ones that drive the best performing traffic. I can’t stress enough how important and valuable this information is to your organic link building campaigns. The top PPC ad platforms have methods to see which content network websites drive the most targeted traffic, and you should take this information and use it to reach out to these sites individually to request a link or establish some sort of offline relationship. If these sites drive quality traffic with your content network ads, they will most certainly do the same with a more comprehensive and permanent presence.

So, have you integrated your PPC and SEO campaigns? If not, consider the above ideas and get your SEO and PPC managers working together. Doing so will save much time and effort and will certainly boost ROI. Remember: PPC and SEO belong together like peanut butter and jelly.

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Nick Herinckx is an Account Executive and professional Internet marketer at Anvil Media, a strategic Internet marketing agency. Nick works with a variety of companies including Axway, Trend Micro and Jones and Bartlett Publishers to increase their Internet visibility and generate a positive ROI from their Internet marketing efforts. With both a background in coding and general marketing, Nick specializes in SEO, PPC management, website code optimization and website promotion strategies.

Connect with Nick via his LinkedIn profile, or email him at nick@anvilmediainc.com.