SEO and PPC - A Match Made in Heaven

30 June 2021

For anyone who runs their own business and wants to have the best possible chance of making a success of it – or, for that matter, even just for anyone who relies on a personal portfolio website in order to market their services as a contractor – figuring out how to properly navigate Google’s search engine results pages is of the utmost importance.

SEO and PPC are both fundamentally important pieces of the puzzle to get right, with regards to maximising your visibility to prospective customers, clients, and interested parties, who might be browsing the web for a given keyword.

Here are a few things to know about SEO and PPC, and the ways in which they interact.

What do these terms mean?

First things first: let’s look at what the terms SEO and PPC actually refer to.

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimisation.” It refers to how highly your website ranks for a given keyword, on Google’s organic search results – in other words, all the things that come under the first few results there are marked as “ads.”

SEO is an art and science in and of itself, but at its core it relies on generating high quality links pointing towards a given website, in addition to having the right keywords featured in those links, and on the site itself.

PPC stands for “Pay Per Click.” This refers to Google’s paid advertising service, whereby you will select a keyword, allocate a budget, and have your website displayed for that keyword (if you can afford it) for a set amount of time, in the first couple of results that are marked as “Ads” at the top of the search results page.

How do SEO and PPC complement each other?

When all is said and done, SEO and PPC are both very mutually complementary things, and having both of these at play can really help you to generate the greatest possible degree of exposure for your website.

It may be, for example, that it takes you a significant amount of time to actually rank at the top of the first page for your given keyword, through SEO practice alone. Keep in mind that the number of people who view links beyond the first page is minuscule.

In this case, having your website displayed in a PPC ad link at the top of the search results page can really help to offset this issue and maximise your visibility nonetheless.

On the other hand, some people habitually scroll past the ads at the top of any search results pages, in order to get to the “real stuff.” Here is where your SEO campaign can compensate for the shortcomings of a PPC campaign.

By combining both SEO and PPC effectively, you can really get the best of both worlds.

Keep in mind: it’s all about the keywords

For both SEO and PPC, the most important thing to get right is your selection of keywords. Google AdWords can help you to identify keywords with the right monthly traffic, and with a level of competition that you can realistically contend with upfront.

Choosing keywords that get no traffic will result in little if any tangible benefit to you, even if you end up ranking first in Google for those keywords.

On the other hand, choosing a keyword for a PPC campaign which is exorbitantly expensive, can make the entire campaign unfeasible for you from the outset.

Make sure to strike the right balance with your keyword selection.