Integrated SEM Approach

Do you know what marketing heaven is? Search marketing strategists found that PPC and SEO working together can create a powerful marketing strategy. It’s as close to marketing heaven as you can get. This is a relatively new approach, and there’s a term for it. The SEM approach ensures that you don’t have to choose between SEO and PPC marketing. You can have the best of both worlds. Not only will this approach drive traffic, but it’ll also work to increase your visibility. They key is to integrate these two practices together as a unified front instead of separate entities.

What are SEO and PPC?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. SEO is tactics that you use to increase the quality and quantity of your organic traffic. It also boosts your visibility in the organic search results. These tactics are all unpaid.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have PPC. PPC is pay-per-click, and it refers to an advertising model. Your buy ads that direct to your website. When people click them, they’ll come to your chosen landing page.

Chasing High Rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP)

Google has several ongoing adjustments for the SERP layout. In theory, Google is making these adjustments to help align itself with consumer objectives. The end goal is to improve the relevance of the listing it displays with searches. Google also strives to improve the quality of the content.

There’s no denying that all of this is helping Google become a much better service provider for consumers. However, it presents challenges for search marketing strategists. Every adjustment Google makes requires these strategists to fine-tune their ranking methods.

Integrating SEO and PPC

Developing and implementing digital marketing campaigns that combine these two practices is necessary to achieve good search visibility. It’s also one of the premier ways to maximise on your conversion opportunities and your organic traffic.

These two strategies allow you to identify and record data points related to customer intentions, behaviour and geography or location. It gives you a whole new precision level that lets you:

• Align your PPC ads with your offline marketing schedule. This maximises conversions and awareness.
• Modify your organic keyword strategy. You can create and optimise new content for organic search in specific locations. You integrate exact keyword phrases from your target audience to line up with their intentions.
• Adjust your PPC budget. You’ll only have to run ads in the most effective time frames and effective markets.

PPC and SEO working together can increase your organic traffic, increase your paid clicks, increase your quarterly profits and save on ad campaign spending.

Combining Information to Make One Cohesive Team

Many digital marketing strategists stick SEO in one corner and PPC in another. They’re on opposite sides of the room, and they barely interact. However, both sides are working at a tireless rate. They’re both creating unique content, developing keywords and creating tactics to attract more customers. Each time has different systems and processes in place to drive higher conversion amounts. There is a large amount of data that they can combine to boost your final results.

PPC will give you instant visibility to a broad market with a large bunch of keywords. SEO lets you target a smaller pool of keywords. So, you can start with the broader PPC campaign until you get high visibility. Once you get it, you can slowly integrate the relevant SEO keywords to target your local audience. This draws attention from both local and regional customers.

The SEM approach combines the efforts of both to drive conversions and improve their digital marketing strategy. The things they excel at when you combine them include:

Increase Your Campaign Intelligence by Sharing Data on Keywords 

Keywords make up the foundation for both PPC and SEO strategies. For PPC campaigns, keywords build relationships with customers who are located down the conversion funnel. For SEO, keywords form the architecture of information on a website and flesh out your content strategy.

Both PPC and SEO require a lot of time doing research on keywords. These keywords align with their potential customer’s behaviour online, drive conversions and project growth in organic traffic. Since voice search is so popular, more customers are using long-tail phrases when they search. Sharing keyword data across both realms solicit conversions and give coordinated messages. 

Combine Metrics and Set Common Goals 

Using both team’s collected information gives you precision accuracy and insight into consumer behaviour. It can also act as a support for your inbound marketing campaign. You can gain valuable insight by combining your organic user engagement metrics and PPC data. This combination gives you clues to how your customers behave when they leave and how your consumers interact.

It makes sense that the metrics your PPC and SEO teams look at when they’re establishing your key performance indicators should almost match. When these two match, you can take this information and apply it to other areas in your marketing campaign. Email marketing, PR and social media engagement would all benefit from it. 

Improve Productivity by Removing Barriers 

You’ll be making a harder job for yourself and your business if you approach PPC and SEO as different entities. It diminishes your team’s productivity levels and isolates crucial information. In turn, it can impact your digital marketing campaign. Keeping these two entities apart doesn’t make a lot of sense. Each side can give the other information points that help convert customers. 

Use Data that Justifies Action and Informs Cross-Channel Decisions 

Developing your strategies requires gathering a lot of actionable data. Using data from just one side of the PPC and SEO puzzle doesn’t give you enough information to work with. Your organic data will allow you to create functional plans from the insight it gives you. But, the amount of organic search data you get may not be enough to justify action.

Paid search information comes based on a larger sample size. This makes it valuable to you as a search marketing strategist. Additionally, this information lets you move forward with confidence. If you’re not able to bridge the gap and completely integrate the two, make sure the two teams can communicate by:

• Communication portals
• Objectives
• Reporting

The overreaching goal of successfully integrating SEO and PPC together is to increase your team’s awareness of opportunities for key conversions. It’s not meant to have two teams performing the exact same time of work day in and day out.

How to Use the SEM Approach to Maximise Your SERP Visibility

Now that you know why and how your two teams can merge and work together, the following tactics will help you maximise on your knowledge.

Optimising Landing Pages

You can drive traffic by optimising your landing page. Optimising this area also drives your conversions, and it’s an essential part of your marketing campaign. Your SEO team can give your PPC team critical information about customer demands, objectives and intentions to increase the click-through rates and reduce the bounce rates.

On the other side, your PPC team has customer online activity insights. They can use these insights to make paid ads pop up at the most qualified candidate. Both teams work to support each other in ways that maximise your traffic, improve customer experience and reduce your ad campaign costs.

Adopt a Holistic Approach to PPC and SEO

There are two big points you want to cover when you run PPC campaigns. They include:

1. Your ad campaign should offer precise messages
2. Your ad campaign should be right next to your organic listing to lead to a higher return

This does take a little work on your part. You want to base your ads on keywords that your company’s niche already ranks for in organic search. It makes you seem more prominent and trustworthy than your competition. Your credibility will go up.

Understand Seasonal Trends

Both teams should share their seasonal data and their data in relation to other offline pieces. This will give you an idea on how to optimise and approach for different times all year round. You’ll learn when customer activity peaks and wanes.

You can create an event calendar that acts as a guide. Use this guide to create organic content that lines up with a targeted audience in certain locations. For example, you can maximise your brand awareness during the busiest seasonal times like holidays. Run PPC campaigns that have unique messages based on location and intention. These campaigns help you convert customers during the low points in the year.

Jump in Front of Your Competition

Both of your teams can come together to share information on your competition. You’ll see how your competition is doing from both sides. Your monitoring systems can keep an eye on your competition by keeping track of:

• Branding initiatives
• Key message points
• Primary and secondary long and short-tail keywords
• Pricing
• SERP positioning

This information can help you improve your conversion ratio, increase your ad speed, and outrank your competition in Google’s organic search results. You don’t have to choose between SEO and PPC anymore to create a powerful campaign. Instead, your search marketing strategists can set up a plan that has PPC and SEO working together to create marketing heaven.