How to Align SEO and PPC for Better Ecommerce Results
By: Sean Chaudhary
Tags: Marketing Strategies, Ecommerce, PPC, PPC Marketing, Seo Tips

Aligning SEO and PPC will help drive more traffic and conversions. Use these tips to enhance your marketing efforts

If you run an eCommerce business, you know how important it is to stay on top of other marketers. With a strong online presence, you have a huge opportunity to attract leads and increase your revenue.

Although people have been shopping online for years now, the COVID-19 pandemic opened a new window for the eCommerce sector. More than ever, more customers are shopping online, and many eCommerce businesses have been set up.

As a marketer, you need to derive strategies to boost your online presence and stay on top of other marketers. SEO and PPC can help generate more leads, traffic and increase conversions. Many marketers claim to have obtained online success via SEO optimization. On the other hand, other markers have achieved higher traffic for their eCommerce via PPC ads. That means you can attract more traffic and increase sales by combining the two strategies. Continue reading to learn how to align SEO and PPC for better eCommerce results.

What is SEO?

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of your site for terms related to your business in search engines like Google and Bing. Google and other search engines use bots to crawl pages on the web, collect information and put them in an index. It then uses its algorithm to determine where a page will rank in the search results for a specific query.

The best part is that you will not pay anything to rank your online store higher on search results. You only need to dedicate your time and effort to create a winning SEO strategy and be patient.

Understanding PPC in eCommerce

Unlike SEO, PPC (Pay-per-Click) is a paid advertising model to help drive traffic to a website. In other words, PPC involves paying an ad publisher every time a person clicks an ad on their advertisements.

PPC ads include search ads, display ads, programmatic ads, social media ads, local search ads, Google shopping ads, and much more.

Combining SEO and PPC for Better eCommerce Results

Both SEO and PPC depend on keyword optimization to appear in related searches. Keywords play a critical role in Google search and Google Search Campaigns. Both PPC and SEO will not attract traffic or convert without using the most relevant keywords. That said, here are the best SEO and PPC eCommerce tips:

Analyze the Most Relevant Search Queries

As earlier stated, both PPC and SEO heavily rely on keywords to drive traffic and generate leads. As such, analyzing the latest search trends is a great tip when combining both strategies. Since you can get real-time data from organic searches, you may want to make it the center of your marketing strategy to get the most of your eCommerce product marketing strategy.

Test the Keywords

PPC can help choose the most accurate phrases for SEO that you can use to update the semantic kernel (the list of keywords that clearly define your site’s subject and are mostly used in search queries). Besides, you can use PPC to test your keywords and choose those with a huge impact on your SEO strategy.

You can also launch contextual advertising and make a list of negative keywords. Ignoring these keywords (which many SEOs do) can lead to a higher bounce rate and decreased conversions. Luckily, PPC provides an excellent way to work with negative keywords, which helps improve SEO and the position of the site on search engine results pages.

Combine Your Shopping Strategies

Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, Google shopping has reintroduced free listings, providing more opportunities to combine PPC and SEO. You can get to the non-promotional listings by registering in the Merchant Center and uploading your products from there. You may also want to combine organic and paid activities to increase your sales.

The idea is to use SEO in areas where organic traffic can lead to a high click-through rate and use PPC spend on channels where paid listing provides the highest results.

Create and Publish Fresh and Relevant Content

SEO analysis helps you create fresh content to show your readers you understand and care for them. This helps develop trust with your readers and ultimately increase conversions. You can then use PPC to fill any gaps. Since informational queries are always cheaper per click, this provides a great way to extend your advertising budget.

Play to Each Strength

Depending on the user’s interests, Google search queries will vary significantly. For instance, you are likely to quickly spend your PPC budget promoting products during peak season as the PPC rates are high. You can avoid this by studying where to get organic traffic. Targeting long-tail keywords via SEO offers an excellent way to reduce your advertising spend and bypass strong competitors.

On the other hand, obtaining Google’s trust, let alone getting organic traffic for a new website can be daunting. Among other things, excessive SEO efforts and over-engagement can hurt your rankings. In such a case, running ads offers a great way to gain enough targeted traffic for a new website.

Test Your Content with PPC

Testing and learning form a critical part of paid advertising. PPC helps test new content to determine what works and what does not work for your audience and use the results you get to enhance your SEO efforts. Whether images or advertisement messages, PPC lets you test new things and select the more effective ones.

Utilize Automation

Automation will help keep up with the growing number of PPC tools. You can use machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to select the best price for advertisements and notify of changes from the required indicators. In short, automation helps you have control for PPC campaigns.

Besides, you can automate various SEO tasks, including competitor analysis, technical auditing, reporting, etc. More specifically, automation helps get real-time market insights to fill gaps in your PPC and SEO strategy.

Use Expanded Text Ad Option to Give More Details about a Product

Potential customers will want more information about a product before buying it. Providing more information about a product using an expanded text ad option will help increase the CTR of ads. This can include links to the site, contact details, geolocation data, and any other description of the product. Adding this information will make your ad more visible on search results and improve click-through rates.

Expand Your Funnel

Many people turn to Google before making a purchase. Acquaintance and product consideration is at the forefront of the sales funnel. You can use this information when creating your promotional strategy.

More specifically, consider setting up your promotional strategy for product familiarization to catch new interest. After that, adjust your PPC and SEO efforts for better results.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, there are various scenarios where combining SEO and PPC can help improve eCommerce results. Among other things, combining SEO and PPC can help get more accurate ad targeting, maintain brand reputation, find more accurate keywords, and check the effectiveness of website changes. By following the above PPC and SEO tips, you will be in a better place to improve your online presence and increase revenue.

SEO and PPC will help drive more traffic and conversions. Use these tips to enhance your marketing efforts