SEO and Paid Media are two fundamental pillars of any digital marketing strategy. SEO focuses on increasing organic traffic to your site, while paid media offers accurate targeting resulting in conversions and click-throughs. Many companies tackle them in isolation, but they’re inherently interlinked.
As a startup, your main objective is growth. Understand how you can use these tools to supercharge your business, implementing the perfect combination of SEO and paid media to affect real change. We’ve got five top tips to get you started.
[Read more: How to Optimize and Expedite Your Company’s Growth Process]
What is Organic SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a long-term play designed to build authority for your brand. Your SEO strategy affects where you appear on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), directly impacting your sales and awareness. Consumers will judge your brand based on its ranking and with over 70% of users clicking on the top-five results, it’s an avenue worth addressing. Great SEO gets you free targeted traffic.
How do you do it? It starts by creating a high-quality website, incorporating keywords, earning backlinks, enhancing your metadata, and optimizing your imagery with alt text. Like most things with digital marketing, the algorithm is continually tweaking. Ensure you stay up to date and ensure you have the relevant resources to feed your SEO strategy consistently.
What is Paid Media?
Paid media includes sponsored social media posts, display ads, paid search results, video ads, pop-ups, and other promoted material. By putting spend behind content through various platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, you’re able to reach audiences that might not have come across your brand.
There’s an enormous media influx bombarding consumers in today’s marketing landscape, making it difficult to stand out organically. By incorporating a thorough paid media strategy, you’re able to drive exposure, reaching qualified leads. You should also monitor your ads performance in order to adapt and improve your campaigns. A way of doing this is through Pudding.ai, their artificial intelligence is designed to help you optimize your creative performance in real time.
How do SEO and Paid Media fit together?
SEO tactics like competitive keyword research, on-page optimization, and backlinking yield better results when combined with social media platforms and pay-per-click (PPC) efforts.
You want to provide a holistic approach to digital marketing, combining your learnings from each category and allowing it to guide future strategies. Paid media means increased brand awareness, which affects your organic SEO, and so the circle continues.
5 Tips to integrate SEO and Paid Media into your growth strategy
1. Create the right content
You can now run a diagnostic report within the “campaigns” tab of Google Adwords to check on your ads. Once you click “run test”, you’ll be able to see which AdWords have the highest search volume.
Use this information to guide your content strategy and SEO efforts. Base your blog content or social posts around these topics. Finding exact phrases is a goldmine for your content creation. In essence, you’ll be using your paid media to feed your SEO, improving your organic traffic.
You can flip this on its head, using your report to create an appropriate PPC ad group. If you’ve invested plenty of time in your SEO strategy, you’ll have a treasure trove of keyword data. Use this information to create your PPC campaign, focusing on your keywords’ with the highest impressions and clicks.
2. Use SEO data to reduce your PPC expenditure
Dabbling in PPC advertising can be incredibly expensive. Use your SEO data to reduce costs, focusing your budget in the most critical places.
If your budget is tight, make the call to rank organically on the more expensive keywords, focusing your spending on the more affordable keywords. Allowing your SEO to focus on these keywords will benefit you in the long run, delivering valuable traffic to your site.
Use SEO data to boost your sales potential and improve your geo-targeting. If a product is ranking well organically, deploy PPC ads offering discounts alongside your organic search listings. It’ll increase your visibility and boost your sales at a lower cost. If a specific geographic location is generating organic search traffic, target your ads to this area to improve your conversion rates.
3. Bid on your brand keywords
You can use SEO to rank organically for your brand’s keyword, but you’ll earn all the best real estate if you bid on your keywords too. It might sound crazy but think of it from a consumer’s point of view. If your brand appears in the top two spots, it’s the picture of brand authority.
Larry Kim, Founder of MobileMonkey and digital marketing guru, recommends that you set aside 15% of your search budget for branded keywords. It’s one of the best ways to keep your competitors out of the running.
4. Use Paid Media to solve your SEO problems
80% of the time, search queries are informational. Customers aren’t always looking to purchase. They might be looking for information, investigating their options, or simply improving their awareness. As a small business owner, you may have invested plenty of resources into a thorough SEO strategy, yet you’re still struggling to appear in the top 5.
Create a compelling ad and bid on the Google Display Network to get your brand out there. It will immediately put you in the running if any of your competitors use display ads for monetizing. Use your SEO knowledge to create a persuasive ad, fast-tracking your way to the top of the SERP.
5. Up your engagement and awareness with paid social media
If you want a broader audience to see your best-performing content on social media, you need to put spend behind it. Paid media posts mean increased awareness and engagement for your business. The more engagement your content receives, the better your ranking.
Engagement directly affects your online reputation. It indicates consumer interest, encourages connections, and generates new leads. Best of all, it tells the algorithm that it’s showing the right content keeping your spot on the SERP.
[Read more: 7 Tips To Follow While Increasing Your Social Media Engagement]
Increase your odds
As a startup, you’re doing everything you can to grow your business. Increase your odds of success by tackling an integrated marketing strategy. Utilize organic SEO and paid media to drive more traffic to your website, increasing your conversions and upping your findability online. While it may be intimidating, it’s worth investing in both avenues, so get started today!
