Use PPC and SEO landing pages
Usually, people think about landing pages almost exclusively in terms of conversion from PPC (or other "closed-loop" streams such as email marketing or banner ads). There is another type of landing page that often is missed, and that is the "SEO" landing page. Unlike a traditional landing page which you usually don't want to be indexed by the search engines (in order to retain the "purity" of your traffic), an SEO landing page is a page designed around a particular keyword phrase, much like most of your Web site pages should be if you are concerned with SEO.
The advantage of using a combination of traditional and SEO landing pages is that you can use the results from each to help both PPC and SEO. If a PPC landing page is popular and leads to high conversions, then you know the messaging is working and relevant to your target audience. And if an SEO landing page performs well in the SERPs, then you know that you're using the appropriate keywords, especially with long-tail terms.
Pick up the slack with PPC ads
If a Web page, for whatever reason, drops in the organic search results, PPC advertising can immediately fill the gap and keep directing traffic to that page until appropriate changes are made to the page and the organic results have improved.
Blanket branding
There is a bit of a stigma out there when it comes to PPC ads around the fact that these are paid-for-placement, and there are many who believe there's much more value in top ranking organic results. If you can successfully own terms in both organic and paid search results it mitigates any discrimination based on placement, and it will also solidify your authority and trust as the most relevant "owner" of the terms. Of course this works very well for branded terms, but can also be very successful with lower competition long-tail terms.
Target the long-tail (yet again)
While organic search optimization can be focused on any terms including the important “high-competition” keywords, these can often be much too expensive to bid on with PPC. At the same time, PPC can be used to drive traffic from the long-tail keywords which may not be as important to initial SEO, and PPC can target typical missed keywords like misspellings or plurals – which are usually low on the list of keywords to optimize for organic search optimization.
All of these strategies will allow you to determine visitor-actionable content much quicker than you might be able to in traditional SEO. Ultimately, you can boost the ROI of both your PPC and SEO efforts when you use them together.
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About the Author
Jeff Jones is a Web-optimization specialist. He helps companies improve their Web sites, SEO results and PPC-campaign performance. Connect and collaborate with him on Twitter.
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In part 1 of this 2 part blog post I started the discussion about how pay-per-click search marketing and search engine optimization can work together to help you choose the right keywords and optimize your Web site copy to be more search engine friendly. So how else do PPC and SEO work together to help your bottom line and save on PPC ad spend? Here are a few more thoughts to consider.
