Both SEO and PPC are different channels for digital marketing, but that doesn’t mean you cannot use both these channels for a single marketing campaign. You can combine the best of both strategies to get a boost in traffic and ranking.

It is worth mentioning here that the common goal of both these marketing strategies is to attract people to your website. By combining PPC and SEO, you can formulate a holistic marketing approach to gain a marketing edge. The benefits that you can get by combining PPC and SEO may help you share learnings, improve budget efficiency, and manage brands to have mutual growth.

Strategic data sharing across both channels

Integrated dashboards displaying SEO and PPC search performance data can help users to share learning across organic and paid search. This approach focuses on keyword-level trends.

You can build a dashboard using Google Data Studio. Keep in mind that you can use any other data management platform to achieve similar results. Building a dashboard can help you export and integrate organic performance metrics such as organic impressions, the average ranking position from Google Search Console, and organic CTR. Similarly, you can combine this data with PPC metrics such as CPC, CTR, and conversion data.

After this process, you can build out some useful charts to identify areas to improve both PPC and SEO. Using scatter graphs is one of the best ways to spot outliers.

Using this data in practice

Cutting budgets

You can cut budgets where you can sustain a downturn. Another way to cut the budget is to prop up performance using best SEO practices.

Here, you are going to have to identify PPC keywords that also perform well in organic results. You can simply stop pouring money to improve in PPC campaigns featuring those keywords. The best way is to put those campaigns on pause and monitor the overall impact on traffic and sales.

Saving more budget in the medium term

This one is a more radical method of saving the budget. The first thing that you are going to have to do is to identify opportunities. For this purpose, you have to identify keywords outside the top 3 organic results. You will also have to see if the average CPC is higher than the account average.

This method is going to increase the amount of workload that your content writers and other people involved in the organic search have to carry. That said, it will be a bad idea to stop paid campaigns immediately and shift to the organic search work as it can impact traffic and sales.

Bottom line

Remember, it will be a bad idea to quit working on either one of the PPC and SEO to focus on only one channel. Stopping working on SEO with hopes of outperforming your competitors through PPC will give your website nothing more than just a spike in traffic. Similarly, focusing only on SEO will make things out of reach for you in this fast-paced environment.