Frequently, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) are thought of as two separate entities. Your firm may have two different people handling these different marketing efforts. If you work with a third-party marketing service, chances are that they also have different teams managing your different paid and organic marketing. But combining your PPC and SEO data can help boost your marketing efforts and subsequently produce more traffic to your site and increase leads. Here’s how:

Increased Keyword Research

PPC and SEO both rely heavily on keyword research. You can use your Google Ads reports to find a lot of information that can help better your firm’s SEO. Analyzing your keyword volume, ad copy click-through-rate, and conversion rates for your PPC campaigns can help find areas for improvement within your SEO. For example, you may find keywords performing well on Ads that you have not optimized your firm’s site, creating new content opportunities for your SEO strategy. You may also find that specific ad copy preforms well, and can use that as guide for your SEO content.

Dominate the SERPs

It’s likely that your firm has a lot of overlap between keywords your firm wants to rank well for organically as well as bid on for your PPC campaigns. By ranking on the first page of organic search results for a specific keyword as well as having a paid ad on the same results page, your firm can potentially have an increase in clicks to your site.

While this may seem like unnecessary spend if you are already ranking in the top organic results for a keyword, a study by Google* once found that if a specific keyword is paused within your PPC campaigns, about 89% of the traffic generated by the ads is not replaced by organic rankings. Pausing a paid search keyword when your firm is already in the top organic search results for the same keyword will may cause a loss in traffic to your firm’s site. Your firm will have a better chance of receiving traffic to your site by maintaining both a top result in the organic searches and keeping your paid ads.

Test New SEO Keywords with PPC

SEO can take a very long time to see results. With PPC, you can often get results much faster by bidding your way to the top of the search result page. If your firm is thinking of adding new content based on keywords you have yet to optimize your site for, try creating a PPC campaign for them first. You’ll be able to see conversation data, volume, clicks, etc. for these keywords much faster than you will with your organic traffic. If you find that these new keywords are generating desirable cases for your firm and have a high level of traffic, then you can take what you’ve learned from these PPC campaigns and use it to write new organic content for your firm’s site.

These are just a few ways to combine your SEO and PPC efforts. Continuing to monitor both your SEO and PPC and finding new ways to fuse them together can benefit your firm’s marketing and result in an increase in leads.

*ai.googleblog.com/2011/07/studies-show-search-ads-drive-89.html