The dynamics of digital marketing are competitive, to say the least. Technology and algorithms are constantly changing, which makes it difficult to keep up. These evolutions often collide with marketing strategies that are working at the time, before bumping them off course.
Digital strategies are a complex weaving of search engine optimization, search engine marketing, content creation, brand marketing, public relations, performance marketing, and more. It’s good news that these tools at your disposal are increasingly effective. But that’s only if you know how to best employ them.
Performance marketing includes all those efforts that are driven by tangible and measurable results. It’s clicks, leads, and sales that rely on PPC and social media advertising, affiliate marketing, and SEM. These paid efforts can reap great results.
SEO goals focus on increasing unpaid traffic to a website by improving its ranking on search engine results pages. The higher a website appears in an organic search, the better.
Although performance marketing and SEO may seem to be disparate spokes of a digital marketing wheel, they aren’t. Not only can they be integrated, but they can also deliver stellar results if mixed well. Here’s why integrating the two can drive maximum impact.
SEO Takes the Guesswork Out of Remarketing
Your content strategy is designed to engage audiences by creating content that’s high caliber in form and relevant. It should be informed by keywords and the intent of online users. Those are the qualities that help boost you up in organic searches and get users to engage.
A click on your website in an organic search isn’t a guaranteed sale, but it’s the first step. Maybe users ask a question or leave an item in their cart without checking out. That’s where you turn up the heat with performance remarketing.
A top-notch performance marketing agency will use remarketing to try to close that sale. It can use the information you’ve collected about potential customers to keep your paid advertising in front of them. As those customers move onto other online searches and websites, there you are, reminding them that you’re awaiting their return.
You’ve probably experienced the same phenomenon during your own personal browsing. You interact with a particular website, and you keep seeing it everywhere. It pops up in paid search results, social media ads, and advertising at the top of virtually every online publication you access.
PPC Analytics Lift Your SERP
Even if you’ve partnered with a performance marketing agency, you still should know a little about how paid ads work. Where they’re placed will depend on such factors as keywords, meta titles, page descriptions, geographic reach, relevancy, and search intent.
You also have an opportunity to extend your ad’s reach with more information that takes searchers to other assets. Those include such calls to action as contact information or click-to-call features. But adding site links can take the reader to specific URLs on your website, and that’s where the rubber hits the road.
The landing page you lead them to on your website should be relevant, informative, and compelling. Ads, after all, can never tell the full story, and they rarely make a sale on their own. They’re too limited in space to do your products justice or tell consumers why you’re the company they should do business with. That’s the role of great content.
Those landing pages need to be optimized for SEO. Algorithms are looking for relevant, customer-centric content, speedy load times, responsive forms, and powerful images. If that’s how you build your landing pages, you’ll grab the attention of search engines as well as potential customers.
Remember, many of the same factors that inform ad placement are also used by search algorithms to rank content. Performance marketing and SEO are therefore inexorably linked. But you need to connect them seamlessly.
Use PPC to Test and Hone Content
Content strategies are a bit more of a long game than performance marketing. No matter how your brand’s organic content lands in SERP, your paid ads might be sitting at the top of page one. There, they’re bound to get clicks.
What users are clicking on and what they do from there provides quick insight into what they’re finding of interest. If you have a responsive content marketing strategy, you can use that information to hone it. By doing so, you’re making it relevant and that will push your organic results upward.
You can also use the inherent speed of PPC ads to test items like headlines, descriptions, and meta titles. The results of a simple A/B test of these elements can reveal a lot about what’s piquing user interest.
Analyze PPC metrics like bounce rates and visit durations too. If users are hanging around for a while, they want to know more. Write content that they’re looking for and search engines will take note.
How users respond to your paid advertising should inform the form and substance of your content. The PPC approach is a good way to put yourself at the top of a search page. Use what you learn to get your organic results up there as well.
Deliver a Bigger Bang for Your Buck
You might view your performance advertising and your SEO efforts as two distinct marketing silos. You’re paying to play in one and might be merely crossing your fingers in the other. But if you put them together in the right way, you’ll achieve better results with each of these strategies. And that might just deliver the impact you need to stand out from your competition.