PPC and SEO, in combination, is the most effective Online Marketing Campaign

Before starting a Google Ads Campaign, we strongly recommend getting your website optimized because Google Ads has a similar algorithm to organic rankings.  The biggest difference is the auction and pay-per-click integration but consider this: Google’s objective is one and the same for both Organic and Paid Ads and that is to be able to serve landing pages that satisfy the User’s query!  Essentially, it means that the entirety of your website should be able to satisfy User and Search Engine requirements.  These requirements include:

• Relevancy and Timeliness
• Quality of Content or EAT (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness)
• User-friendly metrics such as Page Speed, Mobile-responsiveness and more recently Core Web Vitals

When your website is optimized, then these requirements are automatically satisfied.  Without Optimization, your landing pages will not be able to satisfy these requirements.

High-Quality Scores

In running a Pay-Per-Click Campaign, one of the most important metrics is Quality Scores. When your landing pages are optimized, they will get high-quality scores. This metric helps determine where you land on the auction block and how much you pay per click / per thousand views. A Quality Score is one of the top three important metrics of running a successful Google Ads Campaign.

SEO + PPC = High Quality Scores

Low Cost per Click

On Google Ads, a Marketing budget determines the duration of a Campaign so the lower cost per click, the longer your campaign will run.  So this metric is more important to the Company because it affects the bottom line.

From Keyword Planner: An Optimized Campaign pays low range CPCs (cost per click)

The above screenshot is from Google’s keyword planner.  It provides the range of the cost per click per keyword.  If you look at the encircled section, the column on the left is the low range and the column on the right is the high range.  When your website is optimized, you will always only pay the cost per click of the column on the left (low-range).  Google rewards landing pages that satisfy User query in two ways:

1. When your landing pages are optimized, you pay the minimum cost per click (Low CPCs)
2. When your landing pages are optimized, your Ad gets served more frequently than your competitors

Optimized landing pages equals low CPC (cost-per-click)

The keywords from Keyword planner are the same keywords in our campaign and based on our CPC as well as our acquisition costs, you can determine that our PPC Campaign pays the lowest CPC.  Despite the fact that we pay the lowest CPCs our campaign has high CTRs (Click Through Rates) well above the Industry standard of 5%.  In fact, our CTRs are double that of the Industry.

If the two PPC metrics above don’t convince you that running an SEO Campaign alongside a PPC Campaign makes financial sense, here is a rundown of the benefits (and power) of an SEO + PPC Campaign in Combination:

• High Conversions
• Low Conversion Costs
• High Click-Through Rates
• Increase Quality Inquiries
• High Quality Scores
• High Impression Shares
• High Brand Visibility

High Impression Shares via Auction Insights

Have I mentioned that we have such a low budget for our Industry?  Our daily budget is also much lower compared to our competitors, I can tell because our impression share is high and our Top of Page Rate is also high.

SEO + PPC = High Impression Share

This screenshot covers our PPC Campaign for the last 12 months.  Our budget is super small for our industry but we have the highest impression share for this particular Ad group, which is possibly the most important ad group of the bunch.  There are competitors who have such high Top of the page rate but such low impression shares so we can conclude that they are spending a lot more money (or higher CPCs) to get that kind of result.   Remember, Google wants to provide the most relevant landing page for the query so if your landing page isn’t optimized, you are paying top dollar for your clicks.

Again and louder for the people in the back, “SEO and PPC work best in combination!”