How can SEO help you with AdWords?

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is one of the easiest and quickest ways to get involved in Internet marketing.

Google AdWords is definitely the current market leader when it comes to PPC.

What's AdWords about?

The idea behind AdWords is that you, as a website owner, create your own brief text ads and choose keywords, which are words or phrases related to your business. When people search on Google using one of your keywords your ads will appear in the Sponsored Links section (usually in a column on the right hand side).

How much do you pay for clicks?

You pay only when someone clicks on your ad. The amount you pay for every click changes and is dependent on:

1. your maximum bid
2. bids offered by other advertisers interested in the same keywords
3. a Quality Score Google assigns to your website in connection to the keywords you have chosen

These factors will not only influence the price you pay, but also impact the position in which your ad appears. In effect this will have influence on the number of  time your ads get clicked (people tend to click links located to the top of the page).

So what about SEO?

SEO (search engine optimisation) on the other hand is about getting your website listed in the main ("organic") search results. You don't have to pay for clicks there, but it's not easy to get your website ranking for competitive keywords. When you choose both SEO and PPC as marketing strategies for your business, you will usually end up with an overlap in the keywords you target. This is actually a good thing. Why?

One of the factors influencing the price of clicks in your AdWords advertising is the Quality Score you receive for your ads. The Quality Score is determined algorithmically and reflects how relevant the content of your website is to the keywords targeted by your ads. The higher the relevancy, the less you'll pay.

Combine the power of SEO and PPC

To make your AdWords campaign efficient always optimize your website for the keywords you target. The easiest and most cost-effective way to do that is to combine your PPC and search engine optimisation efforts. Most good Brainerd based SEO professionals offer on-site optimisation and Technical SEO as part of their SEO services. You can use this to improve not only your organic search engine rankings but also reduce the cost of your pay-per-click ads.

Even when you're interested in immediate results and want to focus on PPC, get a basic SEO work-up of your website and you just might end up killing two birds with one stone.

Related: Does spending money on PPC enhance SEO?