Irrespective of marketing funnels and purchase intent, SEO and PPC deliver leads on a very different timescale. With Google Ads, you can set up a campaign within a few hours and start paying for high-quality traffic often quite quickly but you’re not going to get fast results from SEO.
It can take months to build up momentum from an SEO campaign but the momentum will continue to build as you optimise your search presence. With PPC, the traffic stops coming in as soon as you stop spending budget but mature SEO campaigns continue to bring in business opportunities for months with little intervention (at some point though, your competitors will start to pull ahead of you without ongoing optimisation).
Quick vs long-term results
Given the inherent differences between phone number database SEO and PPC, there are certain things you can achieve with organic search that you either can’t or do with paid advertising or can’t do as effectively.
- Brand awareness: SEO is generally more effective at building brand awareness than PPC alone.
- Brand authority: With high-ranking organic content, you can build a brand with authority and influence in your industry.
- Thought leadership: Establish your brand as an innovator in your industry.
- Differentiation: It’s always difficult to differentiate with PPC but SEO provides more of a voice to stand out.
- Educate & inform: You can help your target audiences learn valuable lessons from your content.
- Top of the funnel: SEO is more effective at capturing top-of-the-funnel leads.
- Influence purchase decisions: Top-of-the-funnel leads have made fewer purchase decisions, making them more open to influence.
- Address specific needs: SEO allows you to target niche keywords
- Long-tail keywords: Target lower-volume, higher-relevance (and, possibly, purchase intent) keyword opportunities your rivals may be missing.
- Maximise search visibility: You can’t maximise search visibility without SEO – no matter how good your PPC strategy is.
The message here is that you can’t rely on PPC to do everything in your search marketing strategy. Paid advertising is great for generating fast, high-intent leads but this isn’t a sustainable or cost-effective model by itself.
Instead, you want to find the right mix of SEO and PPC to maximise your search presence across the entire funnel.
How do SEO & PPC work together?
With an integrated SEO and PPC seeding marketing on social media strategy, the two channels enhance each other’s results, which is why we recommend getting both from the same agency.
Related reading: SEO and PPC: 7 reasons to use the same agency
Here’s a summary of some of the most important ways SEO and PPC achieve bigger things by working together
- Maximise search visibility: Get china business directory your message seen at every stage of the consumer journey.
- Cover the whole funnel: Capture leads at every stage of the marketing funnel.
- Double impressions: Combine organic and paid impressions to dominate the results page.
- Increase brand recall: Make your brand and messages more memorable with double impressions.
- Capture with SEO, nurture with PPC: Capture top-of-the-funnel leads with SEO and nurture them along the funnel with PPC.
Now, let’s take a quick look at how you can apply these to your search marketing strategy to get the best from SEO and PPC.