One of the biggest myths surrounding search engine optimization (SEO) is that return on investment (ROI) is hard to come by, and if you can’t measure your results, that’s not where you want to spend your money. But the truth is the ROI is there. It’s measurable. SEO is far from dead, and we could argue it’s more important today than it ever had been.
People perform an estimated 3.5 billion searches on Google every day, with organic search clicks representing 53% of all website traffic. Is this traffic worth money? Let’s see. 39% of online purchases start here, so, yes, SEO drives revenue, not just traffic. In fact, in 2021, website traffic is only a part of the equation because 61% of desktop and 34.4% mobile searches result in no click. The searcher sees what they need in the search results and leaves. But if you played your “cards” well – as in information cards – they’ll remember the brand that keeps coming up with the helpful information in their searches.
What does this mean for SEO? It is forever evolving. The days of relying solely on SEO to generate traffic and leads are probably over. Thanks to Google’s policy and advancing algorithm updates that can enforce that, those meteoric rises to number one are no longer possible. This ended up being a good thing because it weeded out a lot of the spam you were once competing with to reach your audience.
Today, we need to think more holistically about search. Organic search is critical, but it’s only a piece of the puzzle. The best digital marketing strategies pair SEO with paid campaigns to max out the ROI for both of them. As SEO changes (and we know it will!), you stay on track toward your goals and connected to your audience. We’ll show you three ways to use SEO and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) to pivot in the digital marketing world.
SEO vs. PPC: What They’re Good At
Even in 2021, SEO strategies primarily attempt to increase both the quality and the quantity of traffic that comes into a website through organic search results. To achieve this, an SEO agency will engage in several SEO tasks including, but not limited to:
- Optimizing website speed, performance, and user experience.
- Increasing the ability of Google to “understand” what a website or page is about.
- Enhancing how the website appears in the search results to make it more clickable.
- Increasing visibility in searches that matter.
- Aligning content with search intent.
- Showing Google that the website is connected to and respected by other related sites online.
- Researching the target audience and competition before creating helpful content for the target audience to find in search.
SEO is good at delivering the right message at the right time to the right person. And yes, SEO people really care about user experience because when you treat people right, they come back.
It’s also has a higher ROI because you don’t pay every time someone clicks. You instead invest in quality content that will appear in valuable searches over and over again at no extra charge. SEO is not good at generating search traffic quickly, aside from the low-hanging fruit that’s ripe for the picking. It takes time to build authority and trust online. That’s what SEO still does today.
On the other hand, paid advertising can quickly put you in front of your target, so you see immediate ROI. But you pay for many clicks that do not become paying customers. You may struggle to reach customers at the right time or with the right message. And you may lose people before they even get to your site.
Despite their differences, SEO and PPC have a lot in common, and that’s why they have such a symbiotic relationship. They both:
- Give you visibility in search, although PPC does it faster.
- Drive traffic to your website.
- Need keyword research to target the right searches.
- Require an understanding of your target customer/buyer persona’s behaviors, goals, etc.
- Require optimization of what appears in the search results, whether it’s a text ad, image, or meta description.
- Need your website to perform flawlessly to seal the deal.
- Can benefit from specialized research, analytics, and automation tools.
That’s a lot of overlap. How can you use this?
1. Get More Out of What You’re Already Doing
Paid advertising and SEO need many of the same resources to perform well, so if you’re investing time or money in something, make that resource do double duty and get more out of it. In other words, when you do both PPC and SEO, you’re getting more ROI out of things you’re already doing.
For example, when you’re investing time to do keyword research, you could apply that narrowly using only PPC. Or you can start targeting those same important keywords with your website’s content. Over time, this allows you to dominate that search by being present as both an ad and visible organic search result. And as your organic ranking grows, you can also choose to spend less on more expensive paid ads. That allows you to focus your PPC budget elsewhere to get the best results.
2. Increase Brand Awareness & Affinity
As you create more website content, you’ll find you get a higher click-through rate on your paid advertisement and organic results because having high-ranking search results builds trust with your audience. They trust Google to rank reputable sites, so the higher you rank, the better off you are.
Squeeze out the competition by having multiple branded links going to your website. Show customers you’re a serious contender in this space, so they’re more likely to check you out. And as you continue to appear in more of the same person’s searches, they become familiar with your brand and associate it with your industry. So the next time they need what you offer, you’re the name they recognize. They begin to see you and notice you instead of tuning you out like a stranger.
3. Increase Ad Conversion Rates
SEO improves website performance. An SEO site is as fast as it possibly can be. If your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load on a mobile device, you lose over half of the people who clicked your ad. Think you’re in the clear? Apparently, most people do. Backlinko found that the average mobile site takes twice as long as their desktop load time. The average fully loaded time on mobile in 2020 was nearly 30 seconds. Most of our sites aren’t performing like we think they are.
SEO also invests heavily in researching how people navigate a website and place their attention and click. It maximizes the performance of elements on the page.
When you make SEO and PPC work together, they become more than the sum of their parts. They become a powerhouse that is hard to compete with.
