How Do SEO and PPC Work Together?

In the dynamic world of digital marketing, “search” often serves as an umbrella term for both search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. Both funnel visitors to your website using the search engine results pages (SERPs). Both impact the search results users are even able to see. 

But many business owners ask, “Can my PPC ads affect my site’s SEO or vice versa?” Technically, the answer is no — having PPC ads can’t affect your site’s ranking, and your site’s ranking can’t affect your ads. 

Instead, you may find more answers in the understanding that you don’t have to choose between SEO and PPC. You can benefit from both, even on a shoestring budget. 

Here are some ways that the two practices can work together to attract people to your website. 

Increased Search Engine Visibility

The most obvious benefit of SEO is to rank higher (ideally on the first page and in the number one position) for one or more keywords that you’re targeting. But purchasing PPC ads for those same keywords with a high enough bid will push your ad to the top of the page a user searches for using that keyword. 

 Sponsored ads get top positioning on the SERPs, which means that targeting both organic and paid advertising ensures that your brand dominates the search results. Not only will you likely capture valuable clicks, but you’ll give the impression that you’re an established presence in a particular market.

Remarketing Campaigns

Even when your SEO efforts increase your website ranking, those same shoppers or potential leads can quickly change their minds. Price and product comparisons on other websites lead to shoppers leaving your website before they’ve made a purchase. 

To get these potential buyers to return, track the goods that initially brought them to your site and purchase ad space to remind them of these exact items at a later time. After all, it’s easier to click on an ad than to make an additional search for specific items.  

Keyword Testing for SEO  

PPC keyword data shows words which have already been searched, clicked and converted. Needless to say, this information simplifies the work of creating an SEO strategy.

To test, simply choose a highly relevant keyword for your products or services and purchase PPC advertising for it. After some time monitoring it, see how your website performs and translate that into optimizing your site for that particular keyword or avoiding it altogether. 

Brand Image Control

Sometimes people write negative critiques about your company online. It happens. Thankfully, a combined effort between PPC and SEO can do damage control by controlling your image through visibility. 

You can begin to control the conversation by focusing on specific keywords and phrases. For example, following BP’s Gulf Coast oil spill, they paid for PPC ads linked to the keyword “oil spill.” They chose to create a landing page connected to BP’s site that showcased their cleanup effort. This can be used as your opportunity to tell your side of the story. 

Social Media Presence

Social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube offer targeted ads to highly specific groups of people. Using Facebook user profile information, ads can be shown uniquely to 20 year olds living in Boston, Massachusetts who are interested in technology and motorcycles. 

The paid ads are precise and can lead to more highly qualified leads in addition to narrowing your overall SEO strategy.

Need help creating a marketing plan using both SEO and PPC strategies? 
Real results to improve your website’s search engine visibility, retargeting, and keyword testing are possible with our digital marketing team. As a leading full-service Internet marketing agency, our experts can work to establish your website’s presence using PPC and SEO. 
Contact our digital marketing experts at RLC Media to start growing your online business today.
 SEO and PPC

Social Media and SEO: 3 Ways To Boost Search Results

 Social Media and SEO: 3 Ways To Boost Search Results

You want as many eyes as possible on your website – whether your goal is to sell your products, promote your services, or, you know, provide the world’s best digital marketing. There are lots of ways to drive traffic to your site, but Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has long stood alone as the most effective avenue to boost search results for business.

Now we’re asking – Can social media directly boost SEO?

Even though social signals like reviews, likes, shares, votes, pins, or links don’t have a direct impact on search rankings, there’s still a strong correlation between those signals and organic search success. What’s more, both SEO and social media have access to tons of marketing data you’ve been collecting for years.

Why not use it to grow and inform both channels?

Here’s how social media can bring more visitors to your website and improve the rankings that get your brand recognized and known.

Brand Recognition

Brand awareness may be the most touted benefit of social media, but we aren’t just talking about gauging your success by popularity metrics.

When someone discovers something on social media, what do they do?

They share a link. They mention your brand name. They write a review.

Although Google’s Matt Cutts debunked the myth that social following and likes played a role in ranking algorithms, getting a lot of mentions online could still cause Google to take notice.

With enough online chatter, Google sees brands as relevant for specific queries and begins ranking them for those queries.

Quality follows also benefit SEO – being followed by 100 people is better than 10,000 if it includes the top 5 influencers in your industry who publish content on a regular basis. A growing partnership on social media can blast your brand to a wider audience and work in the more technical space outside of those platforms.

As you help them with link building from guest posts on large blogs, you’ll likely gain valuable backlinks as a result.

Content Promotion

Social media is often ignored for SEO purposes because links from social platforms are rel=nofollow. In other words, search engines are instructed to ignore the link for ranking purposes in the search engine’s index.

However, it doesn’t matter that much.

If you’re earning nofollow links on high-profile platforms, you’re earning brand exposure, referral traffic and various off-site signals that do help your rankings in the search results.

That means you want to create and promote content that people want. Your brand should have a social promotion strategy for your videos, blog posts, and guides, in addition to a list of your very best evergreen content for re-sharing purposes.

These days, only a small portion of your potential audience sees your posts on a given day, so recycling content is the best way to continue driving traffic to your site.

While the links from social shares may not have the same SEO value as backlinks from authoritative websites, they can impact on-site engagement and bounce rate. There’s no better way to improve your site’s authority than delivering killer content that keeps visitors from wanting to leave your page.

Social media just offers another way to deliver that content.

Local SEO

Simply put, Google (and other search engines like Yahoo and Bing) like reviews. In fact, they make up 13 percent of ranking factors for local searches and seven percent for general searches. Customer reviews on your Google My Business listing reinforces that your business does what it says.

The same is true with Facebook business reviews. While Google likes its own content, it also pulls from other reliable sources to validate the information directly provided on your GMB listing.

That’s why your social media-sourced reviews are linked under the subheading “Reviews from the web” on Google.

Taking proper measures by using location tags can help send location-based signals to search engines that can strengthen your visibility. Consistent business name, address, and phone number (NAP) across your website, business listings and local directories is one way to ensure accurate search results.

You may also try location-based hashtags to get your website discovered and boost search results — #Chicago.

Takeaways

Social media may not have a direct and immediate impact on your search rankings but leveraging both strategies will give you more chances for audiences to discover your brand.

Partnering social platforms with SEO can build site authority, earn backlinks, promote your content and guide local prospects to discover your brand. With these tips in mind, you’ll more easily manage your social media while boosting your SEO (indirectly) at the same time.

Want more insights? Contact our digital marketing experts at RLC Media to start growing your online business today.
Boost Search Results.

What is Duplicate Content and How Does It Affect SEO?

What is Duplicate Content and How Does It Affect SEO?

Even very successful websites get stymied by duplicate content. Think of it this way: Every time you create three or four versions of one of your pages, you’re competing against yourself three or four times before the page even enters the competitive market of search engine results pages. 

 

People often have misperceptions about duplicate content and its effect on SEO, backlinks, and traffic, but we’re here to provide answers. 

 

Whether your site consists of large numbers of templated pages or you’re just beginning the initial phases of web development, read on to avoid mistakes that could cost you valuable organic traffic. 

 

What is duplicate content? 

 

Strictly speaking, duplicate content refers to similar or exactly duplicated content that’s available on multiple locations on or off your site.

 

From a broader perspective, duplicate content refers to content that offers little value to visitors or pages that contain little body content. 

 

A ratio of more than 3 duplicate content pages for every normal page is considered excessive and likely weighing down your SEO performance.  

 

Why is duplicate content bad for SEO? 

 

Duplicate content presents several issues primarily for search engines and site owners:

 

  1. Search engines don’t know which versions to include or exclude from their indices, which means that it’s difficult for them to rank search queries in results. This also creates issues when consolidating the link metrics (anchor text, link equity, authority, trust) to one page or separate pages. 

 

  1. For site owners, search engines will be forced to show just one version as the best result, which dilutes the visibility of each duplicate. Link equity can also be diluted when other sites have to choose between duplicates as well. 

 

Does duplicate content receive a Google penalty?

 

Google tried to squash myths surrounding duplicate content when Susan Moska posted on the Google Webmaster blog in 2008: 

 

Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that. 

 

You can help your fellow webmasters by not perpetuating the myth of duplicate content penalties!

 

However, when duplicate content is a result of intentionally copying someone else’s website, Google has something to say:

 

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. 

 

Ultimately, Google will be forced to choose one version of the content to show in search results. 

 

How duplicate content happens and how to fix it

 

Duplicate content can originate from technical issues like incorrectly setting up the web server or website. But they can also derive from the content being copied and published in other places. 

 

  • URL variations, such as click tracking and some analytics code, can cause duplicate content issues 

  • HTTP vs. HTTPS versions can create duplicate content

  • WWW vs. non-WWW pages can create duplicates of each of those pages

  • Scraped content, particularly identical manufacturer’s descriptions for products on e-commerce websites can be identical in multiple locations. 

  • Index pages such as index.html or index.php may make your homepage accessible via multiple URLs

 

You can essentially fix all duplicate content issues by verifying which of the duplicates is the intended version. 

 

Whenever content on a site can be found at multiple URLs, it should be canonicalized for search engines. 

 

Here are three main ways to do this:

 

Set up a 301 redirect

 

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. 

 

These redirects also link various URLs under one umbrella so search engines rank all of the addresses based on the domain authority from inbound links. 

 

These types of redirects associate common web conventions (http:// or www) with one URL to maximize domain authority.

 

Use the rel=canonical attribute

 

The rel=”canonical” attribute is part of the HTML head of a web page and should be added to the HTML head of each duplicate version of a page. 

 

Its purpose is to tell search engines that a specific page should be treated as though it were a copy of a specified URL, and all of the links, content metrics, and ranking power should be credited to the one specified URL. 

 

Set the preferred domain of your site

 

The Google Search Console allows you to set the preferred domain of your site and to clarify whether Google should crawl a number of URL parameters differently (this is also called parameter handling). 

 

The only limitation in using Google Search Console is that any rules or changes may not affect Bing or any other search engine’s crawlers. 

 

Check out more about duplicate content

 

Learn more about duplicate content by checking out these resources:

Want more insights? Contact our digital marketing experts at RLC Media to start growing your online business today.