Using Paid Search Ads and SEO in the Most Effective Opportunities

A paid search campaign is probably one of the most dreaded, yet needed, strategies many companies try to avoid as much to use. It is, after all, a costly project whose main benefit is only to climb to the top of search results – if used correctly.

The other option for businesses is to use search engine optimization or SEO, which can bring organic click-through results. SEO takes time to flourish, however, and given the nature of competition in the digital world, it might take more effort to produce significant results.

How can you balance spending on paid search ads and SEO to maximize reach and profit potential? Here are three sample situations that display when and where it’s better to use paid search advertising or power-through with SEO.

Increasing Exposure or Viewership Quickly

Paid search advertising is a type of campaign that falls under search engine marketing or SEM. In this setup, a business either pays directly for SERP (search engine result pages) ads or uses a paid model that allows their link to come before organic results.

If a business wants to create a surge in traffic, using SEM methods may work better as they can push your links or content on top of every other result. This process used to be costly, but fortunately, new models such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) came up, where ad spot buyers only need to pay on the number of clicks made through the SERP ad.

Making Users Spend More Time on your Website

If you want visitors to have a better experience browsing through your website, any digital marketing company would recommend you to create a polished SEO strategy. This is because SEO-polished content would likely net your site or web app more users looking for in-depth information.

It’s a necessity for every business to have their digital presence prepped to serve web crawlers properly, even if they’re not paying for ad space. Having more pages with content optimized for search engines will pull up more results with your brand name and links, therefore raising your page or website’s credibility.

Here’s some data for thought: the year-on-year click-through rate (CTR) for the top ranking organic results in Google grew by 0.66% percentage points for desktop searches and 6.28% for the top five sites for mobile (for 2020 vs 2019). So even if you’re not “paying for a spot,” if Google rates your content as excellent, you can still make it to the first page of search results and its value grows according to search engine scoring standards.

Edge Out the Competition in Delivering Answers or Solutions

When it comes to edging out your competitors, it boils down to budget and how well your ad communicates that you have the answer to what users are looking for. The goal to stay on top of the game is to make sure you have a higher CTR.

Improving CTR means increasing the relevancy of your ad and generating more clicks to it. For example, if a user searches for “hardware store near X” (where X is the name of the place) and your content link comes up, it should well be optimized to appear only if your business serves that particular area or near it. Otherwise, the ad becomes irrelevant and will be scored lower by search engines.

Users won’t always click on search engine ads, though, and that is why SEO-refined content (especially for specific topics) can still make your page score better for search quality. Google calls this the E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) principle and while it does not directly affect your page ranking, it helps in other areas, such as increasing your backlinks from other websites.

Conclusion

SEM and SEO are incredibly useful strategies you can use to improve your audience reach. Knowing when to use them can also help your company save valuable time and resources.

Making your strategy profitable is easy if you have a dedicated team of marketing experts manning your project. In case you don’t have an in-house team to handle your campaigns, you can partner up with a reputable SEM and SEO expert in Singapore such as Media Manager. Media Manager is a digital marketing agency in Singapore that can help you create and manage organic and paid strategies. They also specialize in market research and other digital services. For more information, feel free to inquire via our contact form.