How to make PPC and SEO work together

Getting PPC and SEO to work together is essential if you want to generate the most relevant traffic. By integrating both strategies, you can achieve more comprehensive results. SEO provides organic visibility, while PPC delivers quick wins through paid traffic. When both channels are used together, your online presence can be amplified. The challenge lies in managing both efficiently, and this is where automation tools like Shopstory come in, helping you streamline and optimize your PPC and SEO efforts.

1. Why PPC and SEO Are Often Handled as Silos

Despite their shared goal of driving traffic and conversions, PPC and SEO are often treated as separate entities by marketing teams. There are a few reasons for this:

1.1 Different Timelines and Expectations:

SEO is a long-term strategy that requires ongoing content creation, link building, and on-page optimization to gradually increase organic rankings. In contrast, PPC provides immediate results, allowing businesses to appear at the top of search results almost instantly through paid advertising. These differing timelines lead to distinct mindsets and expectations. SEO specialists focus on sustainable growth, while PPC experts are often driven by short-term results and quick wins.

1.2 Separate Skill Sets and Tools:

PPC and SEO require unique skill sets and tools, which further reinforces their separation. PPC specialists focus on keyword bidding, ad copy testing, and budget management, while SEO experts concentrate on content optimization, technical SEO, and link-building strategies. Additionally, the tools used for each are often different—Google Ads for PPC versus SEO tools like SEMrush, Moz, or Ahrefs—leading to siloed workflows.

1.3 Departmental Divide:

In larger organizations, PPC and SEO are often handled by different teams or even departments. PPC may be managed by the advertising or paid media team, while SEO is under the purview of the content or organic marketing team. This separation can make it difficult to coordinate strategies, leading to a lack of collaboration and missed opportunities for alignment.

1.4 Budget Constraints:

PPC and SEO are often allocated separate budgets, which can cause friction when deciding how much to invest in each channel. Marketing teams may prioritize PPC because it delivers faster results, especially when budgets are tight or short-term goals need to be met. SEO, on the other hand, often gets pushed to the side since it requires time and continuous effort to show significant ROI.

1.5 Lack of Unified Reporting:

PPC and SEO are often measured by different KPIs, further contributing to the silo mentality. PPC campaigns are typically judged by metrics like cost per click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR), and conversion rates, while SEO performance is measured by organic traffic, keyword rankings, and backlink quality. Without a unified reporting system, teams may focus solely on their own KPIs, missing out on the bigger picture of how the two strategies can work together to achieve broader marketing goals.

Breaking Down Silos with Automation

Breaking down these silos between PPC and SEO requires a shift in mindset, processes, and tools. One of the best ways to bridge this gap is through automation platforms like Shopstory, which can bring both PPC and SEO together under a unified system. By automating key tasks across both channels, Shopstory allows marketing teams to collaborate more effectively, use shared data insights, and ensure that both strategies are aligned to drive better results.

2. Why PPC and SEO Should Work Together

Both PPC and SEO have their strengths and weaknesses, but their real potential is unlocked when they work in tandem. Here’s why:

1. Improved Keyword Targeting: By using data from PPC campaigns, you can discover high-performing keywords that can also benefit your SEO strategy. This shared keyword pool allows you to focus on the most profitable terms in both paid and organic search.
2. Increased SERP (Search Engine Results Page) Coverage: With a combined PPC and SEO strategy, your brand can dominate both the paid and organic sections of search results. Even if your organic ranking is high, having a PPC ad increases your visibility and drives additional clicks.
3. Faster Testing and Implementation: PPC allows you to quickly test new keywords, headlines, and descriptions, which can inform your long-term SEO strategy. Instead of waiting for weeks or months to see how an SEO change impacts your traffic, you can get real-time data from PPC.
4. Enhanced Brand Awareness: When users see your brand multiple times across the search results page, trust and familiarity grow. Even if a user doesn't click on your PPC ad, your organic presence can still catch their attention later, and vice versa.
5. Unified Data for Smarter Decisions: Combining PPC and SEO data gives you a more comprehensive view of user behavior and campaign performance. By analyzing which keywords convert better in PPC, you can refine your SEO strategy to focus on those high-conversion terms.

3. Challenges of Managing Both PPC and SEO

While combining PPC and SEO is a winning strategy, managing both campaigns can be overwhelming, especially for marketing teams that lack the time or resources. Juggling keyword research, bid management, content optimization, and campaign reporting can become tedious without automation.

That's where marketing automation platforms like Shopstory come in. With Shopstory, marketers can easily create workflows that automate key processes in both PPC and SEO, allowing teams to focus on higher-level strategies instead of manual tasks.

4. How Automation Can Supercharge Both PPC and SEO

At the heart of modern digital marketing is the need to stay agile and efficient. Automation tools like Shopstory enable marketers to handle the speed and complexity of both PPC and SEO strategies. Here’s why automation is crucial in today’s marketing landscape:

1. Time Savings: With automation, you can eliminate repetitive tasks such as manual bid adjustments, keyword updates, and performance reporting. This frees up your team to focus on higher-value tasks like strategy development and creative optimizations.
2. Reduced Human Error: Manual campaign management is prone to errors, which can lead to costly mistakes. Automation ensures that tasks are executed accurately and consistently, reducing the risk of human error and improving overall campaign performance.
3. Scalability: As your marketing efforts grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage every aspect manually. Shopstory's automation flows scale with your business, allowing you to manage large PPC and SEO campaigns without needing additional resources.
4. Data-Driven Decisions: Automation tools provide real-time data, helping you make informed decisions faster. By integrating PPC and SEO automation, you can use insights from both channels to optimize your overall marketing strategy.

4.1 How Shopstory Automates PPC

Shopstory offers a wide range of automation flows designed to optimize your PPC campaigns. Here are some of the key ways it helps streamline your paid search efforts:

1. Automated Bid Management: Manually adjusting bids across multiple PPC platforms can be time-consuming and inefficient. With Shopstory, you can automate bid adjustments based on performance data, ensuring that your budget is allocated toward the most profitable keywords.
2. PPC Reporting Automation: Generating PPC reports for performance analysis can take hours, but Shopstory simplifies this process with custom reporting flows. You can create detailed reports that track key metrics like impressions, CTR, and conversions, allowing you to monitor the success of your campaigns in real-time.
3. Automated Keyword Management: Identifying underperforming keywords in your search term reports and suggesting them as negative keywords is essential for optimizing Google Ads campaigns. Shopstory’s 'Identify Negative Keywords' flow automates this process, saving you time while improving ad performance.
4. Cross-Platform Ad Optimization: If you’re running ads on multiple platforms, such as Google Ads and Meta Ads, Shopstory's automation flows help synchronize your campaigns. You can automate tasks like updating ad creatives, adjusting budgets, and pausing underperforming ads, ensuring consistency and efficiency.

4.2 How Shopstory Automates SEO

On the SEO front, Shopstory offers several automation features that help boost your organic search presence while reducing manual effort. Here’s how it helps optimize your SEO efforts:

1. SEO Dashboard Automation: Tracking the performance of your organic search efforts is critical to ongoing success. Shopstory allows you to automate the creation of SEO dashboards that track up to 20 key organic search terms. This includes metrics like average position, clicks, impressions, and CTR, giving you a complete overview of your SEO performance without the need for manual reporting.
2. Automated Content Updates: SEO requires continuous content optimization to keep up with search engine algorithms and user behavior. Shopstory offers content optimization flows that can automate tasks such as updating product titles and descriptions using ChatGPT to improve SEO, ensuring your content is always relevant and aligned with search trends.
3. Meta Tag Optimization: Meta tags play a crucial role in SEO by providing search engines with important information about your pages. Shopstory helps automate the optimization of meta titles and descriptions, ensuring that your pages are fully optimized without having to manually tweak every single tag.
4. Automated Internal Linking: Internal links are essential for SEO, helping search engines crawl your site more effectively and improving user experience. Shopstory allows you to automate the process of adding internal links to new and existing content, boosting your on-page SEO without the need for manual adjustments.

Conclusion: Automation is Key for PPC and SEO

In today's fast-paced marketing environment, efficiency and agility are essential for staying ahead of the competition. By integrating PPC and SEO strategies, you can maximize your brand's visibility and drive better results. However, managing both channels manually can be challenging, especially as your campaigns grow in complexity.

This is where Shopstory comes in. With its powerful automation capabilities, Shopstory allows you to streamline both your PPC and SEO efforts. Whether it’s automating bid management, keyword optimization, or content updates, Shopstory helps you handle the speed and complexity of modern marketing campaigns, making your team more efficient and effective.

Ready to take your marketing automation to the next level? Get started for FREE with Shopstory today and see how it can supercharge your business's PPC and SEO efforts.