Bringing together PPC and SEO for agents

PPC advertising and SEO are two of the best methods for engaging audiences and converting customers. Marketing specialist, Nelly Berova explains how agents should be using them.

If you’re involved in digital marketing for your estate agency, you’re probably well used to two key techniques – pay per click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimisation (SEO).

We’ve been advocating these two strategies for a while, as they are two of the best methods around for engaging audiences and converting them into customers. But for most teams, these two strands are kept decidedly separate. In this article, we question that approach and consider the enormous mutual benefits of bringing them together.

PPC is a leading form of online advertising. It involves advertisers paying publishers, such as news sites, every time a customer clicks on their ads. As an advertiser, you access PPC by bidding for certain keywords or target audiences, which you’ve identified as crucial for your strategy.

If you read our recent piece on Google advertising, you’ll know that the dominant search engine makes up the majority of the PPC market.

SEO is organic rather than paid activity and about optimising your content to ensure that it ranks on the search engine results pages. It involves targeting the right keywords to match your ideal user’s intent and creating the quality content that people want to read.

Increasingly, you need to think about AI search or generative engine optimisation (GEO) too. This is optimising your content for chatbots and other AI platforms, which people use to answer pressing questions – Chat GPT, for example.

While these disciplines have traditionally been kept apart, they have a lot to learn from one another, especially when it comes to sharing data and amplifying messages. With increasing pressure on marketing budgets meaning every pound counts, this smarter way of working brings real value.

Here are some of the key benefits:

1. Test your messaging in PPC

A new search campaign is a long-term investment that builds over time. PPC results are seen pretty much instantly, however. By working across these two areas, you can test out messaging in PPC before developing it into richer, long-lasting search content.

2. Work symbiotically

Digital marketing is an ever-evolving landscape – what works today may fall flat tomorrow. By letting different disciplines work together, one can substitute for the other. For example, if a Google algorithm update means your content suddenly stops ranking, you might step up your PPC activity for that audience.

3. Use SEO for insight into search intent 

Careful analysis of how your blogs and videos are performing organically can tell you more about your ideal customers’ search intent and the messaging that resonates and drives them to take action. As PPC campaigns can be mobilised extremely quickly, capitalise on this learning, getting the most from your spend.

4. Share the testing and data analysis

If you’re running your PPC and SEO campaigns at the same time – and we think you should be – it’s a good idea to interrogate your data across the platforms. So, you might turn off parts of your PPC activity to test the impact that has on search for a given audience. If the same team carries out data analysis for both, they’ll have a much rounder understanding of how your campaign is performing across the board.

5. Unify your data 

PPC and SEO are traditionally measured in different ways but by introducing your own company standard that works across both you can get useful insight. You might measure the clicks per thousand impressions for both a PPC ad and an optimised blog post, aimed at the same niche audience. If one performs much better do some digging to find out why.

6. Boost your keyword and conversion intelligence

The right keywords and phrases are vital for organic search but identifying them is necessary for paid campaigns too. Similarly, intel in the messaging and tactics that get prospective landlords and vendors to covert can be plugged into your calls to action across platforms.

7. Make the most of feedback loops to eliminate waste

Sharing intelligence rather than working in isolation gives you a double-edged insight into changing markets. The immediacy of PPC performance data is great for trendspotting while SEO results indicate sustained changes in user intent. Examining both together can help you redirect resources, cutting down on waste.

At a time of stretched budgets and a rapidly-changing digital marketing environment, taking a new look at how two essential specialisms work together could be a simple hack that brings great results.

Got a question? Need help managing your SEO, GEO or PPC campaign? Visit www.artdivision.co.uk