Let's face it: a website’s main goal is to get the best search engine rankings. The more your pages appear in the SERP, the better the chances you have to get more traffic. THE solution to improve visibility and profitability is to combine SEO and SEA. Carry on reading to learn about each lever’s role in a digital strategy.
Contents:
When should you do SEO on a website?
There is no “right time” to start SEO on a website, but only the right questions to ask yourself!
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- Is your digital strategy sustainable?
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If you are considering a long-term strategy, then yes, SEO is right for your business.
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- Do you have enough resources to implement an SEO strategy?
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Even if it is possible to rank for free on Google, be aware that SEO comes at a cost. Auditing a website, writing content, buying or creating links... requires internal (time) and/or external (money) skills.
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- When do you want to integrate an SEO strategy into your digital strategy?
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To be effective, SEO must be thought of right at the beginning of a website’s development. Thus, it makes it possible to clearly define its tree structure and the amount and type of contents.
When to start SEA?
SEA is the agile option to achieve short-term results. You start when you want, and stop when you want. Basically, it’s the budget you have that defines your actions.
SEA is ideal to:
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- Make a brand known quickly
- Generate targeted traffic to a website
- Directly understand the return on investment
- Boost seasonal activities
- See your ads positioned above organic search results
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The advantages of combining organic and paid search for more visibility
The best tactic to achieve a good rankings is to create a synergy between the strengths of SEA's and SEO's strenghts.
Time and time again, we have found that websites which appear twice on search engine results pages (both in paid and organic ads) get more attention and more clicks.
Thanks to the SEM (SEO + SEA), you can easily fill the gaps in organic traffic by increasing bids on Google Ads.
And vice versa...
Vice versa. You can reduce your Ads budget on pages that are already performing well with SEO.
The impact of SEO on paid advertising
A website that is perfectly optimized for SEO will have a much better chance to experience a quality score increase in Google Ads. This will increase the brand’s visibility online.
Additionally, users landing on your website from paid ads type the same queries as those from organic links.
The impact of SEA on organic ranking
SEO requires a significant investment to create content. And even with a perfectly optimized website, generating significant revenue from SEO alone is rare.
Regarding SEA, it attracts a significant volume of traffic through pre-selected keywords. And the data gathered from campaigns are excellent performance indicators.
By using them properly, you can quickly judge the website’s quality, and the relevance of your content to Internet users. It is also these results that help you prioritize future SEO actions.
Finally, the SEO + SEA combination enables you to multiply the points of contact with visitors. A user who sees two results in the hot zone of search results (paid and organic) will have more confidence in that particular brand.
This complementarity will help you achieve financial and traffic goals.
How to properly distribute a budget between SEO and advertising on search engines?
SEO should be seen as a way to improve a website’s quality, not as a goal in itself. This mindset will help you increase organic traffic and drive conversions.
Once SEO has been developed, and the search engine rankings are adequate and sufficient, you can start allocating a part of your marketing budget to SEA.
By starting the other way around, you risk wasting budget unnecessarily. The Google Ads algorithm is based on very complex criteria to place a website in first position.
Paying more for keywords does not improve performance. The quality of your ads, website and content however have a significant impact.
For all these reasons, it is important not to lose sight of the value of combining SEO & SEA strategies. Now it's up to you to find the right balance to get better search engine rankings!
Further reading
The complete guide on the referencing of e-commerce sites
The 6 key steps to follow to correctly optimize your e-commerce site with a good natural referencing.