Use the best bits from PPC to improve your organic SEO

A recent study has shown that users who visit a retail website from PPC (pay-per-click) ads are 50% more likely to make a purchase than visitors from a natural (organic) search link.

Pay ads can prove very effective with decent PPC management. But over a long period, PPC can be expensive. Especially if you are targeting high-competition keywords.

However, visits through natural search engine rankings won’t cost you a penny in clicks. You will of course have to invest time and money into making your site search engine friendly – but that usually works out more cost-effective than PPC in the long run if done right.

Here are 3 strengths of PPC and how you can use them in your organic SEO campaign:

PPC strength 1: Choose the page that visitors land on

Use in SEO: Don’t try to optimise your home page for all of your keyword variations. Instead, ensure you have a relevant landing page for each of your target keywords so visitors find what they want as soon as they land on your site.

PPC strength 2: Customised targeted link titles and descriptions

Use in SEO: Think of your title tag as your ad link text as that’s what will usually be the link that appears in the search engines. Ensure it’s descriptive enough to encourage users to click on it when it appears in the SERPs. And ensure you have a good meta-description too – this will appear in the search results if the search engine thinks it’s relevant. So use it to convince users to click on the link.

PPC strength 3: Quick results

Use in SEO: Encourage the search engines to crawl your site more often by adding fresh content like blogs regularly. This, coupled with a good long term SEO strategy, will mean any new pages or products you add to your site will be indexed and ranked by the search engines quickly.

Tom Hallett
Campaign Delivery Manager

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2. How to use meta-descriptions to improve your search ranking
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4. Google issue some guidelines to help them view the best bits of your website
5. Warning: Two Ways of Killing Your Organic Rankings in Google
6. Internet Sales: Top Five tips to convert your website visitors
7. Organic continues to outpace PPC
8. Use Google to improve your website’s internal search

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