The whole point of build­ing and main­tain­ing a web­site is to dri­ve busi­ness to your page. If you have launched an entire­ly new web­site, or your cur­rent web­site isn’t bring­ing any sat­is­fy­ing results, there should always be a cou­ple of options to increase the flow of poten­tial customers.

Tweak­ing your cur­rent web­site by using effec­tive Search Engine Opti­mi­sa­tion (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) tech­niques is one of the ways to improve your traf­fic flow quick­ly and effectively.

While some peo­ple think that it’s wise to sep­a­rate these two types of traf­fic-dri­vers, the truth is that an effec­tive cam­paign will incor­po­rate both – SEO and PPC.

How Do You Know if Your Website is Effective?

Before you start to ques­tion whether your web­site is effec­tive or not, you need to know how to gauge your web­site’s traf­fic. Some of the data that you’ll want to look at include:

• What is your traf­fic data?
• How many peo­ple actu­al­ly vis­it your site?
• What are the things that are direct­ing them to your site?
• Are you already employ­ing SEO and PPC?
• How long are peo­ple stay­ing on your site?

The more time vis­i­tors are stay­ing on your site, the bet­ter the odds are that you’ll gain a new client or cus­tomer. If your web­site traf­fic is low or com­plete­ly non-exis­tent, you may need to revise your strat­e­gy and use our tips on mix­ing SEO and PPC togeth­er to achieve great results in the short­est time. How­ev­er, the old adage still applies — “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

If your cur­rent SEO and PPC strat­e­gy is work­ing, you may not want to change too much, and just take some time to opti­mise and improve your strat­e­gy to get bet­ter results.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine opti­mi­sa­tion. The goal of SEO is to make sure that your web­site dis­plays at the top of the search engine results list.

For exam­ple:

If you oper­ate a yoga stu­dio in Berlin, you want to make sure your site comes up at the top of the list when peo­ple Google “berlin yoga stu­dios”.

One way to do this is to use key­words in the actu­al con­tent writ­ten on your web­site. These key­words are phras­es or terms that will increase the like­li­hood that your site will rise to the top of the heap when some­one does a Google search.

What is PPC?

PPC stands for pay per click and relates to paid adver­tis­ing online. Depend­ing on the ad rel­e­vance, paid ads usu­al­ly appear above the web­sites that rank organ­i­cal­ly in the first pages of search results. Addi­tion­al­ly, paid ads may appear on Google part­ner web­sites and on YouTube.

As a result, you are get­ting a broad­er spec­trum of sources from which to acquire poten­tial vis­i­tors. Unlike SEO, where you use key­words to make this hap­pen for free, PPC is some­thing you pay for.

It is used to gen­er­ate short-term results. It works a lot more quick­ly than SEO. How­ev­er, it’s also a lot more expensive.

Why Do You Need to Use Both SEO and PPC?

The best approach to dri­ving traf­fic to your site is to use a com­bi­na­tion of both SEO and PPC.

You may want to start out with PPC to gen­er­ate a quick influx of traf­fic and cus­tomers to your site. Once this hap­pens, you can main­tain your traf­fic using strate­gic SEO.

Here’s an example of an approach that combines both PPC and SEO

• Kim’s Kale Café spe­cialis­es in sell­ing juices infused with kale and oth­er vegetables.

Her busi­ness is new and local to the Mia­mi area. She wants to gen­er­ate some quick traf­fic to her new web­site, so she pays to make sure her com­pa­ny appears at the top of the Google search list.

• After 3–6 months, Kim’s busi­ness is start­ing to take off, in thanks, par­tial­ly, to her web­site traffic.

How­ev­er, she needs to cut back on what she’s spend­ing on adver­tis­ing, so she stops her PPC. She pays some­one to write unique SEO con­tent instead, using terms and key­words that were suc­cess­ful on her web­site before.

• Less than a month lat­er, she realis­es that few­er peo­ple are buy­ing smooth­ies at her café. This is because she stopped using PPC. 

Once she relaunch­es her cam­paigns in Google Ads, opti­mis­es them to reduce cost and improve the rel­e­vance of the traf­fic com­ing, she starts gain­ing cus­tomers com­ing either from paid ads or from the con­tent that has been detect­ed by Google and appears in search results organically.

Acquir­ing most of the users organ­i­cal­ly is a Key Per­for­mance Indi­ca­tor (KPI) that many busi­ness­es set. But some­times it may be a chal­lenge to accom­plish it short-term main­ly because of the high lev­el of competition.

A well-planned com­bi­na­tion of SEO and PPC efforts will give you more val­ue than using one of the strate­gies alone. Here are some great ways to com­bine both:

• Push vis­i­tors fur­ther up the sales funnel
  Use PPC cam­paigns to gain more traf­fic, SEO-opti­mised con­tent to engage your vis­i­tors and then apply re-mar­ket­ing cam­paigns to bring your vis­i­tors back to your web­site for the purchases.
• Use PPC tools for bet­ter SEO
  PPC key­word research is a great tool to update the SEO seman­tic core of your web­site and rate high­er in organ­ic search results.
• Analyse the data for bet­ter results
  The traf­fic acqui­si­tion data com­ing from both sources bring more val­ue for more pre­cise analy­sis and bet­ter decision-making.