Digital marketing breaks down into three main categories: PPC, SEO, and Social Media. Of course, there are many sub-categories, but these are the main three. Each one interacts with and influences the others, so it’s important to understand how they work together to best target your efforts. This post will focus on PPC and SEO and how they interact.

The TLDR Version

• SEO makes PPC cheaper
• PPC makes SEO faster

Order of Operations

We always suggest that people get their SEO house in order first. This typically means a decent cash outlay upfront to get some groundwork laid. The downside of SEO is that you have to spend money before seeing results. However, once you do, your spend is much less over time than with PPC. SEO takes time to ramp up because many moving parts need to come together and start working in harmony. You can think of SEO like building a house: you need to spend money on the foundation before building the walls, roof, and floors. But once the house is done, your expenditure drops significantly. Over a long timeline, your costs will generally be lower than if you just rented the whole time.

PPC starts working faster and requires less upfront commitment, but it remains an expensive way to get traffic forever. This is the rental model previously mentioned. That means you are in the same situation on day 5 as you are on day 555. Sure, you avoided the upfront costs, but you never get the benefits of ownership over time.

Why Do SEO First?

Several factors determine your CPC (cost per click) for a PPC campaign. One of the most significant is how well the content of the page you’re sending traffic to matches the search that was performed. If a user clicks on your ad for “green chairs” but you send them to a page all about “orange donkeys,” you’re going to pay what I like to call the “stupid tax.” Google will let you do it, but they will charge you heavily for that mismatched click. You want to ensure that you’re showing the user something all about “green chairs” so you don’t spend 3x or 10x the amount on that click due to the “stupid tax.”

How to Avoid the “Stupid Tax”

This is a simple, if not entirely easy, problem to solve. You need to ensure you have a well-optimized landing page for every ad you run in your PPC campaign. That means spending time writing this content, putting it on your site, and ensuring it’s properly linked in the menus, footers, body text, etc. By doing this SEO work, you will save a ton of money on your PPC ad spend. This is the main reason why we say you must do SEO first.

Once you’ve optimized your site for all the search terms you need to rank for, you can start running PPC to drastically speed up the timeline. This is because SEO takes weeks, if not months or years, to ramp up your traffic. PPC can do this in a day. That’s not to say you’re likely to see peak performance in a day, but you will see something on day one, and it will move up quickly from there. Once you dial in your ad rotations, keywords, negative keywords, geographic targeting, etc., you will see your traffic move up quickly.

A Rule of Thumb to Remember

Everyone asks how much to budget for a given campaign. Typically, you can estimate with this rule of thumb: 100 impressions will produce 10 clicks, which will produce 1 contact. That means you need to be prepared to spend 10x the CPC for each contact you want to make. Assuming you will close 25% of your contacts, you need to spend 10 x 4 x CPC to get where you want to be. Let’s assume your CPC is $10, and you need 5 jobs per week. That breaks down into:

• 5 jobs/week x 4 weeks = 20 jobs/month
• 20 jobs x 4 contacts x $10 CPC = $800/month

Of course, all these numbers are pulled from thin air and may be very different from your situation, but you can see how this rough math is done.

Timelines

Again, we’ll use a couple of rules of thumb here, so please realize that your mileage may vary. That said, you shouldn’t bother with an SEO campaign unless you plan to give it at least 90 days. That’s truly the bare minimum to even be worth a try. There are many things that have to happen to kick off one of these, and many of those are outside of what your SEO provider controls. It takes time to build a site, write the content, create graphics, and start building some backlinks. That, however, is the stuff your SEO company controls. From there, those backlinks often require approval from the site owner, and Google needs to crawl/index/discover your site and catalog its contents. That same discovery needs to happen for every one of those profile pages and backlinks that the SEO company created, which also takes time. Then Google will spend time processing and cleaning the data it just scraped and run tests on it to ensure it’s ready for production. Once they do all that, they start to release it out to the world. All of that takes significant time.

PPC is pretty close to instantaneous, but still isn’t. Yes, you can throw together a basic campaign in under an hour, but it won’t be optimized, so the performance will not be great. Great campaigns require the writing of many ads and rotating through them as you discover which ones perform well and which don’t. The same goes for keyword choices. It’s important to remember that you have to give a new campaign at least 30 days to draw even the earliest conclusions. If your campaign has a large budget, you can accelerate the timeline because you’ll have more data to work with. If it’s small, you might have to wait a few months to really see how it’s going. It’s important to make sure you’re making decisions based on data sets that are sufficiently large to capture trends and anomalies. If you bail out of an ad because 3 of 5 people didn’t click, you have made a horribly rash decision with no statistically significant data backing you up. A good bare-minimum number to keep in mind is 100. If you don’t have at least 100 impressions, you know literally nothing about what’s happening. Even at 100 impressions, you know only very slightly more than nothing. Be patient.

By following these guidelines and understanding how PPC and SEO interact, you can better target your digital marketing efforts and achieve more effective results.