Google went ahead and sold 32.6 billion dollars in digital ad sales last year. As a PR and technology marketing agency, we are unsurprised. Google’s advertising platform continues to help us drive our clients new leads, product sales, more traffic and better SEO results.

So, how does it all come together?

We’re Not Talking About Display Advertising

As a technology marketing agency, we know display advertising can be a mixed bag. When the cost of your ad budget reflects only the number of times your ad was loaded on a page someone visited, those ad dollars can skyrocket.

By focusing your campaign on clicks, conversions, and return on ad spend rather than impressions and displays, you avoid the costly impact of issues like:

• False display reporting from websites.
• Websites that force content across multiple pages, boosting display costs further.
• Websites with poor or deceptive ad placements, like ads piled onto the bottom of pages.
• Sketchy sites that load dozens of ads in hidden areas on the same page.

Don’t misunderstand our point here; display advertising can be a terrific branding opportunity for big-budget operations. Also, no form of advertising is free from the internet’s shady nonsense. But, for businesses that need to close sales as quickly as possible, conversion rate optimization is the path to growth.

PPC Builds Leads and Gives Traction on the SEO Battlefield: SERP Page 1

Modern B2C and B2B online presences are best served through integrated PPC and SEO. The reason? SEO is a long-game strategy. Through thorough buyer persona, SEO and competitor research, your website amasses the optimized pages and valuable content that puts you at the top of Google’s search results.

That’s some brutally sought-after territory.

That being said, as you continue to grow your content and optimize your website around the information your prospects need, PPC can help you fuel the growth engine and get you on page one of SERP. How?

Start a PPC campaign using your flawless keywords.

Now, rather than looking at the page one search results with envious eyes, you can put both your company name and your existing content magnets right in front of prospects.

Put that one in your pocket for the next push to energize your marketing communications strategy.

PPC Won’t Hack Your Website’s Keyword Rankings

You may have heard marketing analysts defend underwhelming SEO results by blaming the competition’s (honestly, staggering) budget for PPC.

Take a lesson from Rand Fishkin, marketing software wizard and co-founder of Moz: “They have a real wall at Google between the paid side and the organic side. The organic folks, the engineers, the product managers, the program managers, all of the people who work on those organic ranking results on the Search Quality team, they absolutely will not let paid directly impact how they rank or whether they rank a site or page in the organic results.”

PPC can still be used to improve SEO, however.

PPC’s Results Help Refine SEO for Better Leads and Volume

Remember those keywords you used from your website SEO to help better position your PPC ads? Now it’s time to bring them full circle.

Before we do that, however, make sure you let your PPC efforts mature and refine their targeting. For reasons that would take too long to discuss here, SEO and PPC keywords aren’t perfectly analogous.

That being said, those PPC keywords which underperform can give SEO efforts a window to keywords that might be too broad, off-target or simply don’t fit well into the queries that reflect a buyer’s journey.

And, for PPC keywords directly linked to a sale, you may have found the keyword groups to explore for your bottom-of-funnel content.

Letting these PPC discoveries augment your SEO strategy (as well as the previous points) will mean: Your traffic steadily gets more qualified. Your brand stays top-of-mind for those searching for your hot-button keywords. Your on-page SEO efforts will have more data to work with as you develop the SEO that nets more traffic, leads and rank.

PPC Adds Resilience to Competitive Forces

So, let’s talk about driving leads with SEO.

Let’s say you have a highly competitive, niche product that ranks really well for your killer keywords. Traffic is steady and growing. Leads are qualified and closing.

And now, the competitor you worked months to outrank for those amazing keywords just made the news.

And Google updated the algorithm.

And another competitor just turned on the content production money hose, chasing your rank for that number one result with a barrage of content of every stripe.

Your traffic, rank and lead generation are now in a struggle for their lives.

PPC makes sure your brand and funnel content appear on page one, regardless of the whims of fate.

The Takeaway

Integrating digital ads into your marketing communications strategy gives quick wins for branding, SEO, lead-generation and web traffic. Don’t run your digital ads in a silo and you’ll keep your company on page one.

Need more help getting your advertising to produce results? Download this free infographic to see how Gabriel Marketing’s digital advertising strategy launches your business into the stratosphere.