Paid vs. Organic Traffic: 5 Reasons Why Both Are Important

Original author: Brad Shorr
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Paid or organic - that’s the question.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and contextual advertising (PPC, pay per click) - often suitable for different teams using different strategies. It is important to remember that both optimize your search results. So what should you choose: SEO or contextual advertising?

Answer: both.

SEO and contextual advertising are complementary forms of digital marketing and together these tactics will generate more leads (potential customers) than each separately.

Here are five reasons why you should perform both tactics at the same time.

1. SEO is for a long time. Contextual advertising begins to work immediately.




SEO campaigns require ongoing investment, month after month and year after year. Google wants to see consistent optimization efforts; therefore, switching from large SEO activity to small activity is the wrong way. Why is this so? Firstly, Google can perceive the big bursts of some SEO events, such as acquiring hundreds of links per night, like black SEO and ignoring or even punishing a site. Secondly, legitimate SEO practices, such as developing content on and off the site, maintaining the site and fixing bugs, cannot be achieved overnight, even if the company had the financial resources to do so. Conversely, contextual advertising campaigns can be turned on and off instantly and the advertising budget can increase and decrease with one click of the mouse - without any sanctions from the search engines. The flexibility of contextual advertising is crucial for the marketing budget of a company's net profit. When the business is on the rise, the company can use SEO and increase advertising budgets to take full advantage of the situation. When things get worse, the company can support the SEO campaign so as not to lose the position that took years of effort to achieve, but reduce the budget to keep it under control.

2. Universal search makes double campaigns more powerful.


Previously, the appearance of the site on Google’s top really meant something. Now - not so much.
When users enter their queries into Google, they see universal or “mixed” results, consisting of organic results, news, videos, localized results and contextual advertising. While maintaining a high organic rank is still important, depending on the page size of the search engine results, pages with a high rank can easily be lost when mixed. Here is an example of search results with mixed results. It is not so easy for the user to distinguish advertising from search results:



By conducting SEO and advertising at the same time, the company receives greater visibility in the search results.
If a user skips a site in search results, he may notice an ad and vice versa. In addition, the company gains credibility when users see a site in the top for requests and a quality advertisement. They think: probably this company is a leader, since they dominate Google at my request.

3. Contextual advertising - checking ideas for SEO.


An important context feature is that keywords, ad text, and landing pages can be tested continuously. The information obtained from testing ads is extremely important for improving SEO campaigns, which are much more difficult to test. Currently, Google does not provide keywords for webmasters on search traffic, so it’s impossible to find out which keywords traffic comes from an SEO campaign. On the other hand, keyword data is visible to contextual advertising. Knowing which keywords create a good conversion for contextual advertising, gives SEO managers valuable information on which words they should focus on. Moreover, SEO managers greatly benefit from this information. A good ad campaign leads users to pages, Designed specifically for the advertised offer. If, for example, a proposal for a discount of $ 50 has a 25% more conversion than “two for the price of three”, then SEO managers should add a more popular offer to the strategically important and relevant pages of the site, which will significantly improve lead generation.

4. Contextual advertising takes into account a wider reach for keywords.



By keyword span, consider SEO centimeter width and kilometer depth, and contextual advertising kilometer wide and centimeter depth. While a reliable SEO campaign will be targeted to hundreds of keywords, similarly reliable contextual advertising will be targeted to tens or even hundreds of thousands of keywords. Thus, while the SEO campaign will develop its strategic keywords, the simultaneously launched contextual advertising campaign can have much wider reach, leading leads by keys that are not even close in the SEO campaign. This is especially important for long-tail keywords — complex keyword phrases such as “mobile credit card processing for candle makers.”

Long-tail keywords are applied to specific market segments or to specific applications of a given product or service. These keywords tend to have a low frequency but an extremely high conversion rate, which makes them impractical for SEO, but ideal for contextual advertising.

Why?

Because in order to achieve high organic visibility, the SEO campaign will have to create a steady stream of content for the site and external sites and receive incoming links relevant to keywords. For contextual advertising, only the cost per click (maybe $ 15) and a high chance that the user will become a lead or a client.

5. Contextual advertising allows the company to control its brand


Unfortunately, some companies implement "competitive contextual advertising campaigns." For this strategy, company keywords include competitor brand. Thus, when users search for “boots from Vasya Pupkin”, they see the advertisement for “boots from Petya Ivanov.”

First, let's be clear: competitive campaigns are not a good idea.

They have poor conversion and reduce the effectiveness of the overall efforts of the advertising campaign. Nevertheless, this practice exists and companies must protect themselves by launching their own branded contextual advertising campaigns, i.e. targeting keywords that include their own brand.

Starting a branded advertising campaign, as opposed to competitive campaigns, is a great idea. Brand campaigns have very high conversion rates because users are looking for a brand. Plus, branded advertising is clearly relevant, increases the quality indicator of the company - the quality of ads measured by Google, which the campaign adds or pauses, measured by Google. It is equally important that when conducting brand campaigns, users will see the company’s announcement together or instead of competitor’s ads. All clicks that could lead to competitors will lead directly to the company, preventing the competitor from profiting from a hard-earned reputation.

Be sure to track leads


We saw how SEO and contextual advertising work together to create sales. In conclusion, keep in mind that potential benefits will be lost if the company is not able to track the transformation of leads into sales. A reliable tracking system saves conversions, including online and phone orders, and their sources. Only when the company knows where their online leads come from (contextual advertising, SEO campaigns, social media or “inbound marketing”), can you make informed decisions about how much to spend and what to focus on.

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