Mr. Zuber Sheikh, MD, Rank My Business says, ‘Great SEO can help you save on PPC budgets’!

If you are a marketer or a business owner, you would agree that smart marketing is all about getting the most mileage from your marketing buck.

Whether it is to gain new customers, retain existing ones or build better brand equity, you want to ensure that your spends pay off in the way want. But this isn’t always possible, as there are so many external variables at play in the real world, which can really influence how your advertising works. This is quite prominent when it comes to offline marketing, without you always having a clear idea about what is really working and what isn’t.

However, in the world of digital marketing, it is possible to not only get really granular about where you spend, but also calculate the exact ROI of each campaign and each channel. This should make it easy for you to plan your budget outlay basis the value you earn from each, right? Well, not always. For many marketers and business owners, there is often the challenge of what to allocate higher budgets for, and to balance spends between paid and organic efforts, due to the time difference it takes to see results.

Paid advertising or PPC certainly offers many obvious advantages – immediate wide reach and visibility on specific keywords and topics, and an almost instant spike in traffic to your website. However, it can also take away a huge chunk of your digital marketing spends month on month, even if you are particular about optimizing your campaigns in real time.

Now, an ideal scenario would be when every increase in your paid advertising spends results in a proportional increase in visits, leads and conversions. But let’s be honest – it that it may not always be that way. And if we go back to the first point about smart marketing, PPC doesn’t seem like the best option from a long term perspective. And here is where I’d like to put the spotlight on SEO, which often doesn’t get the same level of spends and efforts.

As humble and uncertain as it might seem, SEO is really a digital marketing tactic you cannot afford to ignore. Whether you are a startup or an established name in your industry, nobody can deny that organic search results can have a huge influence at all levels of the sales funnel. Yes, it is true that SEO campaigns take time to start showing real results, but once this happens; there is no looking back as the results only add up over time. SEO is a strategy for the long haul, and has the ability to compound its results over time.

But the question here should not be about choosing one against the other; it should be how do we increase our ROI, and lower new customer acquisition costs (CACs)?

And the answer lies in finding the right balance between both paid and organic efforts. That’s right. Having a well planned PPC campaign along with sustained SEO efforts can actually complement each other beautifully. In fact, our experience shows that a strong SEO strategy can even help you save on your PPC budgets, both in the short and long run. Surprised? Don’t be. Let me tell you how.

There are ways in which SEO can help you reduce your PPC spends. Google’s Quality Score can be a wonderful diagnostic tool to evaluate whether your PPC campaign is on the right track. This score primarily depends on your expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience.

Good SEO practices essentially seek to establish your domain’s authority for a particular topic / set of topics through quality content and a great user experience. Instead of looking to convert clicks into sales, quality content strives to offer value and be of relevance to potential visitors. This approach can completely transform the type of content being created for your campaigns, and cause your pages to not only rank, but also see better CTR.

When this happens, your domain will be considered an authority for the keywords in question, giving them a higher relevancy score. This in turn can positively impact your ad campaign’s Quality Score, and result in a better ad ranking, and lower CPCs.

In any marketing activity, data can help drive better decisions. When it comes to an integrated PPC + SEO campaign, it is a win-win for both tactics, as the data from either one can help to enhance the performance of the other. For instance, the rich insights from Google Analytics can help us understand which keywords are helping get more traffic as well as web page effectiveness, which can be used for gaining a competitive advantage in your PPC campaign through better keyword selection. It can also spotlight keywords that could have been earlier missed, and allow you the opportunity to explore yet another way to drive traffic to your website. It goes without saying that the performance of your SEM ads could give you ideas on how you can improve your existing webpages.

It helps to offset the cost of your PPC campaigns with SEO, by switching select keywords from PPC to SEO. You could focus your efforts on organically ranking for expensive keywords, so that you need not spend huge monies on paid ads. Imagine getting a steady stream of organic traffic for your most competitive keywords, without having to pay for every visit! Sounds good, doesn’t it? You could also continue running your PPC campaign for the same keyword alongside, but you can save significantly on your overall paid advertising costs in this manner.

It is said that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the same holds true for both SEO and PPC. By combining both these tactics into an integrated search strategy, you might be able to achieve a better search presence for all keywords within a controlled budget.