First, let us present the independent merits of Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, also commonly referred to as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or paid search. Whether you use Baidu Advertising, Google AdWords and/or Bing adCenter to run your PPC campaigns, each platform essentially has the same primary benefits:
- Instant visibility within the SERPs (unlike SEO)
- Flexibility
- High level of control
- Pay per click model (minimal wasted media spend)
Aside from all of these benefits, having a PPC campaign is a great way to gain more insight to ultimately boost SEO performance. The search industry is now realizing that collaboration between SEO and PPC professionals is a key factor of successful search marketing.
Reason 1: Discovering New Keyword Opportunities
When optimizing for organic search, we generally target one primary keyword and another secondary keyword per page. This means that the total number of keywords we can target is limited to the amount of content on the site. In contrast, with PPC we can target thousands of keywords which give us an extraordinary amount of data to play with, including important metrics such as conversion rate. Keywords which convert well in a paid search campaign are also likely to convert well in organic search.
Reason 2: Filling Content Gaps
Search engines have made a number of updates to their algorithms with the aim of providing their users with “fresh” content. Creating and adding good content to your website on a regular basis is more important than ever, however you may be at a loss as to what content you should write about. Creating more content that you think your users will find useful is fine, but wouldn’t it be better to create a content plan that is backed up by data? Identify your potential new content topics, create ad groups based on those topics and add them to your PPC campaign. Once you have enough data, compare the KPIs of each ad group to determine which content gaps you should fill.
Reason 3: Increasing Traffic Exponentially
Many people believe that if they already rank well for a given keyword in the organic search results, there is no need to target the same keyword in a PPC campaign. After all, clicks from organic search results are free, right?
With experience in both paid and organic search, we know that when you simultaneously target the same keywords via both channels, an exponentially larger amount of traffic will be generated… here’s why. If your website is organically ranked at #1 on Google but has no PPC presence, you are giving competitors an opportunity to steal your traffic via PPC ads, which often appear above the organic search results.
Reason 4: Increasing CTR From Organic Search
The copy used in PPC text ads is arguably the most vital element which affects the Click-Through Rate (CTR). In SEO, we know that the page title and meta description are visible to human users within the SERPs; they should always be created with this in mind. Although the meta description is not used by major search engines to determine ranking any longer, a well-written meta description can be the difference between someone visiting your site and someone visiting a competitors’ site. From analyzing PPC ad copy, it is possible to discover which words and calls to action perform best; you can then use your findings to optimize the meta description and increase CTR from organic search.
