Integrating Your SEO And PPC Strategies

by Tony Hill

Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click advertising are regularly placed in two very distinct and often conflicting categories when it comes to online advertising. This hardly comes as a surprise when considering that, fundamentally, SEO involves outwitting search engines to bolster a site's positioning amongst search engines and PPC involves following a set of rules and paying to be listed ahead of other sites listed in the search results. These two online advertising methods are inherently different, however, have great potential to work together.

PPC is a type of online advertising that allows online businesses to bid to list their website on influential page positions within various search engines. These 'bids' are most often determined as a cost per click and online businesses can allocate a monthly budget to ensure they do not exceed what they can realistically afford. Many consumers are dubious of PPC listings however, so you are effectively marketing to a limited audience. Having said that, PPC does prove to be an effective method of getting new visitors to your website and results are instant.

Conversely, SEO focuses on listing a website in the organic (or natural) search results by building a strong series of inbound links for given phrases, optimising the web page's Meta fields (Meta titles and descriptions), images and alt tags throughout the site. The organic search engine listings where search engine optimised websites appear are much more trusted by online consumers, however, results are slow to yield.

With PPC giving online businesses instant results - albeit results that are not always trusted amongst consumers - and SEO providing consumers with trusted results that take time to yield, there's an apparent synergy that online businesses ought to take advantage of; uniting their SEO and PPC spending to formulate an integrated search marketing campaign.

It proves valuable to use PPC when researching the key phrases your business ought to target; online marketers can use PPC spending to estimate the number of click throughs. When considering that SEO requires a significant time investment, it's worth looking at the results gained from your PPC campaign to help guide your SEO campaign towards success. Furthermore, when waiting for your SEO campaign to yield results, PPC can generate immediate results that will help maintain a healthy cash flow for your online business.

However, integrating your search marketing activity should be approached with caution; online businesses must be careful to ensure they are not targeting the same consumer twice, whilst also ensuring they are not under investing in both SEO and PPC activity and consequently missing out completely. Careful planning and execution of your search marketing strategy is therefore vital if you are to gain effective results.

web design agency and SEO kent are currently being researched by Tony, an online marketer

Article submitted Tuesday, February 21, 2012 & read 2 times.

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