Paid or organic - that is the question.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and contextual advertising (PPC, pay per click) are often suitable for different teams using different strategies. It is important to remember that both optimize your search results. So what should you choose: SEO or contextual advertising?

Answer: both.
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SEO and contextual advertising are complementary forms of digital marketing and together these tactics will generate more leads (potential customers) than each separately.

Here are five reasons why you should do both at the same time.

1. SEO is for long. Contextual advertising begins to work immediately.

SEO campaigns require constant investment, month after month and year after year. Google wants to see consistent optimization efforts; therefore, the transition from a large SEO activity to a small one is an erroneous way. Why is this so? First, Google can perceive big bursts of some SEO activities, such as acquiring hundreds of links overnight, like black SEO and ignore or even punish a site. Secondly, legitimate SEO practices, such as developing content on and off the site, maintaining the site, and correcting errors, cannot be achieved overnight, even if the company had financial resources to do so. Conversely, campaigns of contextual advertising can be switched on and off instantly and the advertising budget can increase and decrease with one click of the mouse - without any sanctions from the search engines. The flexibility of contextual advertising is of great importance for the marketing budget of the company's net profit. When a business is booming, a company can use SEO and increase advertising budgets to take advantage of the situation. When things get worse, a company can maintain an SEO campaign, so as not to lose its position, which has taken years of effort to achieve, but reduce the budget to keep it under control.

2. Universal search makes dual campaigns more powerful.

Previously, the appearance of the site in the top of Google really meant something. Now - not so much.
When users enter their queries into Google, they see universal or “mixed” results consisting of organic results, news, videos, localized results and contextual advertising. While maintaining a high organic rank is still important, depending on the format of the search engine results page, pages with high rank can easily be lost when mixed. Here is an example of search results with mixed results. The user is not so easy to distinguish advertising from search results:



Carrying out SEO and advertising at the same time, the company gets more visibility in search results.
If a user misses a site in search results, he may notice an ad and vice versa. In addition, the company gains credibility when users see a site on the top of requests and a high-quality advertisement. They think: probably this company is a leader, since they dominate Google at my request.

3. Contextual advertising - checking ideas for SEO.

An important feature of the context is that keywords, ad text and landing pages can be tested all the time. The information gained from testing ads is extremely important for improving SEO campaigns that are much more difficult to test. Currently, Google does not provide keywords for webmasters on search traffic, so you cannot find out by what keywords traffic comes from an SEO campaign. On the other hand, data on keywords are visible for contextual advertising. Knowing which keywords make a good conversion for contextual advertising gives SEO managers valuable information about which words they should focus on. Moreover, SEO managers benefit greatly from this information. A good advertising campaign leads users to pages designed specifically for the advertised offer. If, for example, a $ 50 discount offer has a 25% more conversion than “two for the price of three”, then SEO managers should add a display of a more popular offer to strategically important and relevant pages of the site, which will significantly improve lead generation.

4. Contextual advertising takes into account a wider girth of keywords.

For the girth of keywords, count SEO centimeter width and kilometer depth, and contextual advertising kilometer width and centimeter depth. While a reliable SEO campaign will be tuned to hundreds of keywords, similarly reliable contextual advertising will be tuned to tens or even hundreds of thousands of keywords. Thus, while the SEO campaign will develop its strategic keywords, a simultaneous launch of a contextual advertising campaign may have a much wider reach, leading leads on the keys that are not even close in the SEO campaign. This is especially important for long-tail keywords — complex keyword phrases such as “mobile processing of credit cards for candle makers”.

Long tail keywords apply to specific market segments or specific applications of a given product or service. These keywords tend to have low frequency, but extremely high conversion, which makes them impractical for SEO, but ideal for contextual advertising.

Why?

Because in order to achieve high organic visibility, an SEO campaign will have to create a steady stream of content for the site and external sites and get inbound links relevant to keywords. For contextual advertising, only the cost per click (maybe $ 15) and a high chance that the user will become a lead or a client.

5. Contextual advertising allows the company to control its brand.

Unfortunately, some companies are implementing "competitive contextual advertising campaigns." For this strategy, company keywords include a competitor brand. Thus, when users search for “shoes from Vasi Pupkin”, they also see an advertisement for “shoes from Petit Ivanov”.

First, let's be clear: competitive campaigns are not a good idea.

They have poor conversion and reduce the effectiveness of the overall campaign effort. Nevertheless, this practice exists and companies must protect themselves by launching their own brand campaigns of contextual advertising, i.e. targeting keywords that include their own brand.

Running a brand advertising campaign, unlike competitive campaigns, is a great idea. Brand campaigns have very high conversion rates, as users are looking for a brand. Plus, branded advertising is clearly relevant, increases the company's quality indicator - as measured by Google, the quality of ads that are added or suspended by the campaign. It is equally important that when conducting branded campaigns, users will see the company's ad together or instead of a competitor's ad. All clicks that could lead to competitors will lead directly to the company, making it difficult for the competitor to profit from their hard-won reputation.

Make sure you track leads.

We saw how SEO and contextual advertising work together to create sales. Finally, keep in mind that the potential benefits will be lost if the company cannot track the lead conversion to sales. A reliable tracking system saves conversions, including online and telephone orders, and their sources. Only when the company knows where their online leads come from (contextual advertising, SEO campaigns, social media or “inbound marketing”), can you make informed decisions about how much to spend and what to focus on.

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