Why PPC Should Be a Part of Your Online Marketing Strategy

If you’re an SEO, it’s easy to discount the role of PPC in overall online marketing strategy. When most other types of online marketing succeed, they improve search engine optimization: content increases backlinks, usability increases conversion rate and makes our search traffic more profitable, and social media and email marketing both increase user engagement. But if PPC succeeds, you had to pay Google to send visitors to your site, which feels like an SEO failure.After working for months to secure a top spot on a search engine results page and losing the click to the PPC team’s ad they wrote and targeted in under an hour, SEOs can feel like the straight-laced athletes losing the race to the herculean competitor that we know is doping. “They might be winning now,” we think jealously, “but SEO is long term. SEO will win in the end.”

And that’s true, to an extent. SEO is long term: you’re never going to get immediate results. With PPC, you absolutely can. But that’s what makes them great together: they have opposing strengths and can fill in for each other.

At Distilled, we started as SEOs, but we’re moving towards becoming all around online marketing consultants. Often, PPC is a part of the optimal online marketing strategy for our clients.

Just Remember: PPC Takes Time
The trick with PPC is that it’s insanely easy to set up but fairly difficult to get a good ROI. I can’t tell you how many clients have told us, “We tried Google AdWords, but it didn’t work for us.” When we look at their history, we see they set up a poorly configured campaign, ran it for a month, and shut it down. You’re not going to get good results in a month – even for experts, it takes some time to respond to AdWords’ results, tweak settings, and get traffic up and cost down.