If you have read several articles, tutorials, and blog posts relating to SEO and paid advertising such as PPC, you might have concluded that each of these marketing strategies is done in isolation from the other. In other words, most of the content online about either SEO or PPC suggest that they are done separately and almost to the extent that they compete with each other.

That is not surprising given that some marketers are huge fans of PPC and will write passionately about its merits and how it can quickly drive traffic to websites. Other marketers are SEO experts who are fully committed to keeping on top of the unending changes Google makes to its algorithm and helping to drive “free” organic traffic to websites.

You will note that we placed “free” in quotations as no traffic is completely free because there will be a financial cost to create an SEO campaign, or at the very least, there is a time cost given how long some SEO campaigns take to bear results.

Despite all of their differences and the situation where some marketers appear to be in either the PPC camp or the SEO camp, the fact is that neither of them should be seen as the antithesis of the other. We will go further than that and state that one of the best and most effective ways to create a successful traffic generation campaign is to utilise both SEO and PPC within that campaign.

In other words, we are suggesting that rather than having to choose one or the other, you instead use both SEO and PPC to complement the benefits and advantages that each of them has. This way the individual results that each can provide are enhanced when those results are combined. Continue reading, and we will explain ten effective strategies to achieve what we have just described.

#1 – Implement A PPC Campaign For Immediate Traffic: If your business requires immediate traffic, then the quickest way to achieve this online is to start a PPC campaign. By setting an affordable budget, bidding on relevant keywords, and producing ad copy that will convert you could have traffic arriving on your website within minutes of your PPC campaign going live.

#2 – Implement An SEO Campaign For Long-Term, Sustainable Traffic: From the fast traffic to the slower but often more sustainable and reliable traffic that SEO can produce. Be aware that you will need to be patient with SEO. However, you can get faster results by turning over your SEO to a local SEO agency. They may not create traffic overnight, but it will certainly arrive sooner thanks to their SEO expertise and experience.

#3 – Utilise PPC For Keyword Testing: SEO traffic campaigns target keywords and often the problem is not knowing which keywords to target. This is where PPC can help, thanks to the quickness of how soon you can see results. Using PPC to test keywords allows you to assess search volumes, click-through rates, and conversion rates, meaning you can better target your SEO efforts on the best keywords and avoid the poor ones.

#4 – Use SEO To Bolster Your PPC Quality Score: A significant factor in PPC campaigns is the Quality Score. This is measured using factors that include an ad’s relevance to search queries and the user experience on the website they click to. Enhancing your on-site SEO can boost relevance and user experience leading to a better Quality Score and, thus improved PPC ad performance.

#5 – Use PPC To Target Your Most Difficult SEO Keywords: Even an effective SEO campaign that helps you rank for many keywords can struggle to do the same for the most competitive keywords within your market. It may do so in time, but meanwhile, you can use PPC to target these keywords. Your ads will enable you to appear at the top of Google’s page one and generate significant traffic until your SEO does likewise.

#6 – Use SEO To Ensure Your Landing Pages Are Effective: For a PPC campaign to be successful, the landing page that the paid traffic clicks through to must be appealing and relevant. This is where many of the SEO tasks which you carry out on your website’s pages will help massively. Fast load speeds, relevant content, and great user experience will make for PPC campaigns with high ROIs.

#7 – Use PPC For A Retargeting Campaign: Let us say your SEO traffic converts on your website at 20% which is respectable. That means 80% of your traffic does not convert. However, thanks to Google Analytics and the data it provides about those who visit your website, you can retarget the 80% of non-converting visitors using a PPC campaign and do so multiple times.

#8 – Use SEO To Enhance Your Local Visibility: For local businesses, a local SEO campaign that targets a local audience can be a highly effective strategy with a high ROI. As you are competing for local keywords, such as those which include locations within your target area, competition can be less intense and thus it is easier to rank locally than with generic, non-local SEO campaigns.

#9 – Use PPC For Testing Ad Copy: One of the issues with an SEO campaign is that results take time to filter through and if you create content or sales copy on your website and they do not produce results it can take time to rectify and test again. You can overcome this by using your PPC campaigns to quickly test ad copy and landing page copy and get the results must faster than you could ever with SEO.

#10 – Use Both PPC And SEO Data To Fully Optimise Your Traffic Generation Campaign: This final strategy simply means that you take the wealth of data you will have from both your PPC and SEO campaigns respectively to identify where you can optimise and make further improvements to keyword selection, ad copy, landing pages, user experience, and conversions.