Small and medium businesses with active websites most commonly generate traffic in two ways – through SEO, which is usually managed haphazardly and ineffectively, and with a PPC campaign, which is usually managed haphazardly and ineffectively. Whereas most articles about SEO and PPC discuss them separately or as comparisons, the purpose of this article is to help you use them together more effectively. You will find that using them together more effectively will help you use them more effective individually as well.

What SEO & PPC Do For You

SEO and PPC are both excellent tools to generate sales leads and help your business grow but each needs to be managed actively as your efforts in each area tend to lose their effectiveness over time when left unattended. Strategically, you can separate them like this:

SEO = long term, free, continuous traffic you can affect but not necessarily control. Effectively managed SEO usually has an excellent ROI, depending largely upon the online competitiveness of your industry or niche and how well you convert traffic into sales.

PPC = immediate paid traffic you can control. The ROI depends on how well you create your PPC ads, choose keywords, understand the dynamics of PPC bidding, and how well you convert your traffic into sales.

Using SEO and PPC Apart

Search engine optimization (SEO) should be included in your overall design and content generation strategy. It is your long term design strategy and the details of your SEO should be tweaked often. A site well designed for SEO will achieve placements near the top of many search engine results pages (SERPs) and thus generate free targeted traffic.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is a marketing method you can use to immediately generate traffic for any specific page of your website which makes it especially effective at generating sales for new products or for boosting sales for existing products. Beginning a PPC campaign is like opening the gate for the on-ramp of a toll road to your site on which you pay the toll for each traveler in hopes that many of them will buy something from you when they arrive at the destination (your landing page). PPC campaigns are also great for testing demand for new products before investing heavily in promotion of a website or product.

Using SEO and PPC Together

How you use your SEO and PPC efforts together depends upon how much online coverage you want for a given product and much time and money you are willing to spend generating your desired results. Generating the most profit from your SEO efforts and PPC campaigns requires knowing your positions in SERPs for each and how much traffic each is generating for you. This can be detailed work so you should focus on your most costly PPC terms first. Let’s walk through an example of using SEO and PPC campaigns together (or not). It is a simple example but I think it is the best way to explain the logic.

Orange You Bananas for SEO and PPC?

Let’s say you invented and sell orange-flavored bananas. They keep well for weeks and are completely shippable. Some of your customers quickly discovered that they make excellent smoothies and the requests for smoothie-related products is flowing in like crazy. You do a little research and find that people are starting to search for orange bananas smoothie mix. So, you decide to create and market “orange bananas smoothie mix.”

You optimize a new page of your site around this keyword and begin a PPC campaign on Google for the keyword phrase “orange bananas smoothie mix” on which you spend $20 per day and immediately receive sales of $300 per day. Great! Luckily, you are still the only seller of this product and because there is no competition for “orange bananas smoothie mix” you reach the number one spot on the Google SERP in only 3 days. Other listings appear but they don’t actually have much to do with smoothie mix or orange flavored bananas.

So, now you you have the top PPC position and the top free-listing positions. Curiously, your daily sales only increase $25 to $325 when you reach the top spot in the free-listings but you also notice that your Google expense drops to $8 per day. As a test, you pause the PPC ad and leave yourself with only the free-listing in the top spot. Your sales drop back to $300 per day but your marketing for that keyword is completely free. It is up to you to decide if you want the extra $25 in sales per day but in this case it is probably better just to stick with your SEO results and avoid the expense and hassle of managing the PPC campaign.

Tossing in a Monkey-Wrench

Two existing online sellers of smoothie mixes hear about your success and the popularity (and profitability) of orange bananas smoothie mix and decide to go after the same key phrase that has brought you so such steady sales. They each create content optimized for “orange bananas smoothie mix” and within days take listings two and three on the SERPs. Each competitor also begins a PPC campaign to take more traffic. Luckily, there are more links to your site because of all the blogger buzz around your interesting invention and product so you get to keep your number one spot in the SERPs (for now) but both competitors have two listings (one free and one sponsored ad). Your sales immediately drop to $100 per day. Ugh!

This means war so you un-pause your PPC campaign but because of the competition for your keywords your price per click costs twice as much as before so you are spending $40 day to be at the top of the sponsored ads. Your sales increase to $175 per day but it is tough to justify spending an additional $40 per day for another $77 in sales. You cut back your PPC spending and take second place. Luckily, the competitor in the number three spot was only willing to pay the minimum so you get spot number two for a bargain. You are now spending $22 per day for your PPC campaign and your sales settle in at $155 per day, which you can live with. In this case, keeping your SEO and your PPC campaign is better than using only one.

It’s About Attention

The more competition you have for a given product or keyword phrase the faster your positions on SERPs and paid listings can change. You can almost always end a sentence about your SEO or PPC positions with “for now.” Further, effectively managing how you use your SEO and PPC campaigns together requires you have excellent data and information about each individual concern – from competition to the profitability of a product and its impact on the sales of other complimentary. It takes work but using your SEO and PPC together effectively should help you maximize the ROI of your marketing budget and the sales of your most profitable items.