Brand success requires balancing paid and organic searches

30-second summary:

Pay-per-click advertising will not work if you rely on it for short-term results. However, it is important to ensure your website is optimized for user experience. Once your site is in a comfortable place, PPC advertising can help increase brand reach.

SEO is essential for growing a business. It is impossible to attract customers if people can’t find your business, especially with ecommerce growing at an unprecedented rate.

Unexperienced business owners might fall for pay-per-click advertising (PPC) to quickly increase brand awareness. For brand success, it is important to find the right balance between PPC and organic marketing.

Six ways I found the best balance between PPC and organic marketing to ensure that every business owner can create awareness for their brand in the right way.

Optimize your website before you go live

A fully functioning website is essential before you focus on organic or paid search to build your brand. A website that is not functional can make it difficult for potential customers to purchase. It is important to inspect all aspects of a website, including broken links, load times, and how many customers can be hosted simultaneously. Avoid overoptimizing a website or using too many keywords. Keywords should not be used in a way that is obvious to the untrained eye. Otherwise, they could add negative SEO value.

Wait for organic SEO improvement by relying on PPC

It would be wonderful to be able rely only on organic marketing to increase brand awareness, but it is almost impossible to do so when you are just starting out. PPC advertising was encouraged in the past to be used while a company waits for organic SEO improvements to happen. PPC is not an excuse to ignore organic marketing. The goal is to increase a business’s search engine optimization value while using PPC. PPC results should be used as a guide for organic marketing efforts in the long-term.

Try out brand-related keywords

A business can experiment with its PPC advertising strategy once it is in a good position. If organic brand-related keywords fall in place, the PPC advertising budget can then be redirected to test new keywords and increase brand reach. A business must constantly update and explore its keywords to improve their organic SEO value. PPC results should be used as a guide for organic marketing planning, just like the previous paragraph.

Both short-tail and longer-tail keywords should be considered

A short-tail keyword, also known as a ‘head term’, is a search term that contains one to three words and covers a broad topic. Short-tail keywords are difficult to rank on the first page of search engines due to the sheer volume of results. Long-tail keywords, however, remain valuable because they have a greater likelihood to bring users closer to a point for purchase when searching them. A search for “shoe shiner”, for example, would result in a short-tail keyword. However, searching for “how do I shine my shoes” will yield a long-tail keyword that is more specific and three to five words. While the shorter-tail keywords are more popular, ranking well for long-tail keywords can give a business an advantage in the market.

Google is not the only source of information.

Many business owners, managers, and executives will want to concentrate all their efforts on Google. This is a natural tendency since it’s the largest search engine platform in the world. It is worth testing out ads on Bing, to see if there are any other returns. If the results are favorable, it may be worth splitting SEO-related efforts among multiple platforms.

Mobile and desktop marketing can be done using PPC advertising.

Mobile and desktop search results are very different. Although it is obvious, desktop users will get more results if they use a search engine that works on mobile. Mobile users have a smaller window of opportunity, which is the size of the search box on a smartphone. This makes it crucial to use PPC advertising on mobile. Mobile users are less likely than desktop users to perform multiple searches with different keywords.

A focused and efficient strategy is required to increase brand awareness through both organic marketing and PPC ads. While relying solely on PPC advertising may seem easy, slowly working on organic marketing will allow businesses to utilize PPC advertising to increase brand awareness. Although business owners may underestimate the importance SEO, it is vital in today’s digital market.

SEOTesting was founded by Nick Swan.

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Search Engine Watch: How to balance paid and organic search for brand success

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