Whether your company is B2B or B2C, it’s highly likely that potential customers are turning to search engines like Google when looking for the products or services you provide. This means that improving your visibility on search engine results pages is crucial to any lead generation strategy.
There are different methods you might consider exploring to make sure customers they can easily find you when they need to, and are drawn to visiting your site. One is to achieve as much relevant organic web traffic as possible through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
The other is to achieve high visibility in search engines through Search Engine Advertising (SEA), i.e. paid advertising.
Although SEO and SEA marketing are different tools, it’s possible to create a synergy between the two to maximise your chances of turning a potential customer’s interest into a concrete conversion. First, let’s look at the strengths of each.
Boost organic ranking and improve user experience with SEO
Increasing the ranking of your website in a search engine’s search results is every commercial website’s main goal. Why? Well, the reason is obvious. The higher your website ends up in the result list, the more visitors it attracts and the more likely those visitors will turn into actual customers.
This makes SEO the perfect instrument for increasing the organic visibility of your website in, for example, Google’s search results. Developing an excellent SEO strategy can be a time-consuming and wide-reaching process: to truly optimise a site, you need to consider not only your web content (e.g. valuable content, use of keywords, avoiding duplicate content), but also links (e.g. using internal links, fixing broken links) as well as the technical setup of your site (e.g. page speed, using keywords in image names).
Once implemented successfully, a good SEO strategy can greatly improve not only your site’s visibility, but also the user experience thanks to valuable and engaging content, user-friendly navigation, and fast loading speeds, among other benefits.
Use SEA to achieve fast results
While SEO is a long-term strategy that can take time to show results, Search Engine Advertising (SEA) can be used to build a brand and customer base faster, as it allows you to display ads in search engine results the moment someone searches a specific keyword.
Pay-per-click ads are the most widely used method of SEA marketing. These can appear in search engine results and are at the right-hand side or at the top of the page, and are identified discretely as being ads rather than organic results.
With these ads, the advertiser pays for each ad click. Because keyword selection determines when your ads are displayed, it’s important to have done in-depth keyword research (which is also part of your SEO strategy) to identify the best terms to use, otherwise you could potentially miss your target audience.
Choosing the right keywords (those with high volume but low competition) can also help your ad rank higher and cost less.
How SEO and SEA combine to bring extra value
It’s important to keep in mind that SEO and SEA marketing not mutually exclusive. SEO techniques can have a positive impact on your SEA actions and vice versa.
For example, to fully exploit your SEA strategy, you need to use the highest performing SEO keywords. Furthermore, site content optimisation, such as optimising your landing page by using the same keywords, your site’s Quality Score (for Google) and the relevance of your site is taken into account when calculating the score in SEA.
On the other hand, your SEA actions can also affect your SEO strategy. For example, you can use your Google Ads performance data to reintegrate high performing SEA keywords into a long-term SEO strategy.
At the end of the day, search engine marketing should always be about incorporating synergies and finding the right balance between SEO and SEA. In its turn, this will lead to the perfect lead generation strategy.
For other Digital marketing topics, take a look at our Digital Marketing Guide.
