Better Results
What are SEO and PPC?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the improvement of natural or ‘organic’ rankings in search engines and Pay Per Click (PPC) is the term for the adverts that appear at the top and to the side of organic results in Google and other search engines.
Google decides what appears in organic results, but they make their money from the PPC ads. You can choose almost any keyword and pay for an advert to be shown when people search. If the advert is relevant to them, they will click it and are directed to a website of your choosing.
Often brands do not merge the two channels and in many cases run them separately of each other. Both options have the same aim; to strengthen your online presence.
Encrypted Search Results
Late 2013 Google made a switch to provide encrypted search results across the board, this had repercussions for search marketers. Previously in analytics we could see which keywords people were searching to find our sites. With this change by Google we no longer have this information for organic visitors. Google does however provide the information on PPC campaigns.
How does this affect PPC and SEO? It’s all about the data and optimising your website and content to match what your visitors want and engage with. You can no longer see which keywords provide you with visitors who engage with your site the best.
For example Free Rein provides digital marketing services, we want visitors to find our sites after searching for keywords such as “digital marketing services” as this will give us the highest chance of someone contacting us.
We used to be able to see which keywords people were using to find us, how many pages those people were viewing, how long they were staying on the site for and a host of other valuable information. We could then use this information to tailor our website to be most effective and useful for those visitors. Now that we cannot see those keywords, we just have a bunch of data and a bit of guesswork.
Combine Campaigns
This is where PPC comes in, putting some budget aside for PPC can help you in a few ways with SEO. Firstly you can find out which keywords provide the visitors that have good engagement with your site through trial and error. Secondly it is important that your content – that is your page title and meta description which people see in search results are optimised and are persuasive enough to make people click.