Search Marketing: How PPC Can Enhance Your SEO

In the “old days” of traditional marketing (about 2-3 years ago) advertising and PR were the two mainstays of marketers.  In advertising, big budgets and creative talent allowed you to control your message and build your brand.  In public relations, influence and relationships with the media allowed you to add credibility to your brand through stories in the press.  But aside from shared branding themes, there was typically little overlap between the 2 worlds, and almost no shared learning.

Search marketing changes things.  In the Internet Marketing world, search advertising (PPC) is the latest form of paid brand-building, while SEO and Social Media are the newest strategies for boosting your  credibility online.  Traditional advertising and PR still exist, of course, but there are good reasons why companies are increasingly shifting their marketing budgets away from these channels into search-based Internet marketing.  The most obvious reasons are:

• the growing number of hours that people now spend online
• the fact that businesses can target audiences more effectively and less intrusively, since PPC ads and organic search listings display only when they’re relevant to what someone is actively searching for
• the ability to measure results and improve the return on your marketing investment

But there’s another, often overlooked reason why Internet search marketing trumps traditional advertising and PR – the crossover effect.   Pay per click advertising, if done well, can provide exacting metrics that tell you the comparative effectiveness of:

• specific keywords
• ad copy
• landing page content
• geographic regions

Which search phrases are sending the most traffic to your site?  What words or page elements cause visitors to spend more time on a website page?  What words and ad copy produce the highest sales conversions?  Drive the most revenue?  In other words, which variations of your ads can produce the biggest return on your marketing investment?

Once you understand these gems – the actual words, copy, and regions that drive leads and revenues for your business – you can make liberal use of them in your SEO efforts and your offline marketing activites.   Here are some ideas:

• Use the tested keywords to optimize the pages of your website, putting them into your page title, headings, first sentence and sprinkled throughout the copy (make it natural, not “stuffed”).  This is the first step of SEO, which will help your website to rank better in Google and other search engines.  Next, use these words in any content  or links you send out to other sites, linking them back to your site.  This “link building” will further help your web pages to rank for the target keywords, and will help qualified searchers to find your site.  
• Use the tested words whenever you talk about your company, online or offline.  After all, these are the words your customers are thinking.  Use those keyword phrases in your press releases, blog posts, email marketing campaigns, and social media activities. 
• Put extra sales & marketing effort into the geographies that send the best traffic to your site; that’s where your strongest leads are coming from.  Sponsor events there, offer special incentives on a regional basis, do a regional direct-mail campaign.
• Note the ad copy and landing-page offers that get the greatest response.  Use these as the basis for new marketing offers – both online and offline.

As you introduce new products or services, launch new marketing campaigns, or announce company news, think of PPC advertising and metrics as your testing and proving grounds.  There’s no better way to get measurable, actionable, real-time customer feedback and data.