One of the common misconceptions in digital marketing is that SEO and paid search are mutually exclusive. If search visibility is achieved through SEO, why invest in paid search? Although it might seem unnecessary, running a paid search campaign using AdWords can bolster your SEO strategy and ensure that your brand has a commanding presence on search engine results pages. Here are four reasons why using AdWords strengthens your SEO strategy.
Reason #1: Organic Rankings are Volatile; Ad Rank is Not
Organic rankings can be volatile. Unless you work with a proven team of digital marketing professionals and skilled content strategists to continuously produce high-quality content, your rankings could fluctuate unpredictably. One day you’re in the top five for a high-priority keyword, and the next day you’re nowhere to be found. With Google’s constant algorithm updates and user-interface changes, organic rankings have grown increasingly volatile. Tackling these issues alone can be a daunting task.
This is not the case with AdWords. Once you have the right mix of quality score and budget, your Ad Rank (your ad position relative to other ads) is fairly consistent. However, reaching this point can be challenging without the insight of a designated Google Partner like Leverage Digital. Paid search campaigns require a fair amount of work to achieve the right Ad Rank for the right price, but you have far more control over the ranking of your ads than you do over your organic search rankings.
Reason #2: Earn Twice the Visibility
The Google search results pages contain a lot of information, all of which competes for searchers’ attention. So, while being listed on the first page is great, being listed twice is even better, particularly if both your organic search ranking and ad are listed in the top three organic and paid positions.
Furthermore, if your competitors are listed once on the first page for a priority keyword, while you’re listed twice, you have double the visibility and thus a clear advantage if the rankings are comparable.
Reason #3: Increase Click-Throughs
A natural byproduct of increasing search visibility is increasing clicks to your website. Even though clicks are not a measurement of success, they are a prerequisite for conversions.
Google conducted a study in 2012, which concluded that 50 percent of clicks generated by paid ads are not replaced by organic clicks when the ads are absent and the website has a first position organic search ranking. The study also shows that as the organic search ranking decreases, the percentage of clicks not replaced by the paid ad increases. This implies that organic search alone cannot drive as much traffic to a website as organic search combined with paid search.
Reason #4: Increase the Probability of Conversion
By increasing traffic to your site, you also increase the probability of conversions. We have seen increases in conversions as high as 200 percent as a result of combining SEO and paid search. While your conversions may not necessarily increase 200 percent, it is logical that they will increase as a result of higher search visibility and an influx of traffic to your site.
Conclusion
With the right execution, a paid search campaign combined with an already successful SEO strategy can deliver traffic and conversions that you would otherwise miss by relying solely on organic search.
If you want to dominate the search engine results pages, you need to implement a digital marketing campaign that goes above and beyond your competition. At Leverage Digital, we employ innovative digital marketing strategies to help you engineer your own success. Our award-winning agency combines industry-leading design with thorough statistics tracking to ensure your objectives are met with measurable results.
