The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact all around the world, not only from a business perspective but throughout our lives. There is still a lot of uncertainty surrounding when life can go back to normal and with that uncertainty comes a lack of business security. Companies of all sizes have felt the impact of COVID-19 on their organisations, with many being forced to furlough all of their staff or simply close.

At Siteminders, we have been working together with our clients to give them the best chance of succeeding or, in some cases, growing during the COVID-19 lockdown. This goal has led to a lot of sector-based research occurring within our team, with a particular focus on e-commerce.

The e-commerce industry is fairly new on the block compared to many of the industries we live with today and as a result, it has never undergone the stresses that a global pandemic can bring. In this analysis, we are going to cover everything you need to know about e-commerce during COVID-19, including the positives, negatives and how current e-commerce businesses can maintain growth and success.

What is E-Commerce?

To start with, we should talk about what e-commerce actually refers to. E-commerce is defined as:

Commercial transactions conducted electronically on the Internet.

This makes e-commerce a very broad term and in turn, a very broad industry. Any business that sells a product or service online can be classified as an e-commerce business, even if there is a physical shop attached to the same organisation.

The COVID-19 E-Commerce Acceleration and Opportunity

With country-wide lockdowns in place all across the world, physical shops have gone from decreased sales to no sales at all. With no profit to speak of, businesses running exclusively physical stores have been forced to decide between adapting and collapsing under the weight of the pandemic.

Simply put, more businesses are shifting to digital as currently, e-commerce is the only reliable way of generating income. Without digital sales, many of these organisations will be forced to close down and businesses who were previously sceptical and moving online are now being forced to. Overall, COVID-19 has accelerated the transition from physical to online business for many different companies in a variety of sectors.

With the closing of physical shops consumers have been forced to change their habits too. Many more people are going online to make their purchases because the internet is the only option available to them. This has opened the door for e-commerce businesses to see growth and success as their sales spike, only held back by their capacity to fulfil orders or provide the services they offer.

Which E-Commerce Businesses Are Growing?

There are particular e-commerce sectors which have seen immediate increases in sales. According to BigCommerce’s analysis of buyer behaviour, the Food, Gifts, Apparel, Games and Home and Garden industries have all seen marked increases in purchases. This makes sense as these sectors make up entertainment (a necessity through lockdown life) and everyday lifestyle items, apart from Gifts which can be considered a luxury, but one we feel obliged to indulge in.

One of the clearest patterns not just across these areas of e-commerce but across all industries, is the use of sales. Businesses are identifying the increase in online sales and strive to attract and lock-in these buyers through discounts, with BigCommerce identifying 73% of top retailers running sales during the lockdown period. This is unprecedented and reflects the fact that larger organisations, arguably more than smaller businesses, are desperately trying to maximise sales during this time of uncertainty and may even be feeling the pressure of the outbreak more than their smaller counterparts.

Which E-Commerce Businesses Are Struggling?

On the flip side, even with the surge of online users and consumers, there are some e-commerce sectors which have struggled more. Primarily, these are businesses selling products which people no longer require or cannot use during lockdown. Luggage and Gym Bags have both seen significant drops, alongside Swimwear and Cameras, all areas where you would expect to see decreased sales. Though Gym Equipment has remained prominent as people buy gear they can use to workout at home whilst the gyms are closed.

For these sectors and other businesses which are struggling to see growth due to their product range, it may be time to expand into what consumers are buying. Developing new supply chains and releasing products aligned with buying habits is essential if struggling e-commerce organisations want to survive.

How E-Commerce Businesses Can Capitalise on Changing Buying Habits

Alongside adapting their product range based on new buyer behaviours, the most important method for e-commerce businesses to come out of the COVD-19 epidemic in a position of strength is to develop their digital visibility. Large major retailers are currently moving online to survive and with their introduction comes greater competition for small and large e-commerce organisations alike.

In short, to survive, e-commerce businesses need to take advantage of their head-start and establish a strong online presence to maintain digital visibility. Investing in online marketing channels is the best first step to achieving this. Here are some of the most effective channels to begin optimising.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the bread and butter of modern-day digital marketing. It serves as the long-term goal and baseline of any digital strategy as search engines are the major method that users will find a business they want to purchase from.

To summarise briefly, SEO involves optimising a website so that it can be read easily by major search engines like Google. Through targeting relevant, high-volume keywords and amending web pages from a technical perspective, it’s possible to improve a website’s chances of appearing on the first page of Google or search engines like it.

Statistically, according to BrightEdge, 51% of all website traffic comes from organic searches like these, where users search a keyword and click on a website which appears. To put that into perspective, the next highest marketing channel is paid advertising, which generates only 10% of website traffic.

With that in mind, if an organisation doesn’t employ SEO strategies, they are potentially missing out on over half of the traffic they could generate. Additionally, they will likely have to pay for most of the traffic their website receives through other channels, reducing the profit made from any conversions or sales which do occur.

These statistics explain why SEO is the backbone of any modern e-commerce business’ digital marketing strategy, and why our Siteminders team place emphasis on its importance for all of our clients.

Social Media and Social Media Advertising

Social media has taken the world by storm over the last two decades, establishing itself as a major digital marketing channel which can no longer be ignored. The main benefit of social media is that it serves as a direct link between business and consumer, allowing a brand to develop a real and tangible relationship with its customers. This relationship builds trust and loyalty, two essential traits which could save a small business going through hardship during challenging times like those presented in the COVID-19 outbreak.

On top of this, social media provides opportunities for targeted advertising. Advertising on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn allows organisations to filter the type of people they are advertising in previously impossible ways. Instead of television ads or billboards which opt for mass marketing, businesses can focus on specific sexes, age groups and demographics, even filtering their adverts to only be delivered to those with specific interests.

This granular targeting allows e-commerce organisations to only pay for adverts when they are delivered to those most likely to buy their product or service – an invaluable tool to create a stronger brand and improve digital visibility.

At Siteminders, we work with many of our clients to build social media followings and run targeted ads on their behalf. Whether it’s to generate brand exposure or specifically focus on sales and revenue, we have seen success across a host of different platforms and approaches, including for e-commerce websites and platforms.

Google Ads

Finally, we should mention Google Ads. As Google is the most widely used search engine in the world, its advertising platform is often a must for those looking at digital marketing.

Google Ads allows businesses to appear at the top of Google searches, even if their website wouldn’t naturally appear there. This is a great option for maintaining digital visibility whilst beginning search engine optimisation work which should, eventually, replace the need for paid ads.

Additionally, Google Ads has a specific offering tailored to traditional e-commerce businesses. Google Shopping Ads show an image of the product as well as its price and delivery information during relevant searches, which can hugely improve relevant traffic to an organisation’s website whilst increasing the likelihood that the user will convert into a sale, as they already know the product’s price and appearance.

At Siteminders, we advise our clients on which searches they should be targeting and work with them to set up Google Ads product feeds which are fully optimised for the best results. These feeds regularly see a strong return on investment and can make a difference for smaller e-commerce sites which lack the search engine presence to stay afloat with the increased competition sweeping the digital sphere.

Develop Your Business’ Online Visibility Today

If you are an e-commerce business looking to stay on your feet or simply generate more revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic, we can help. Our simple but effective digital marketing packages can be tailored to your business goals and needs, with local and national campaign options available. We shape our campaign and focuses based on your objectives, which is what helps us boost revenue and online visibility for all of our e-commerce clients.

Explore our packages today for more information or contact our dedicated team for bespoke advice and suggestions tailored to your business.

Sources:

https://www.bigcommerce.co.uk/blog/covid-19-ecommerce/

https://www.brightedge.com/resources/research-reports/content-optimization

Making up a vital part of any successful online marketing strategy is the presence of good content, but what exactly does that entail? And how can you distinguish between a good piece of content and a bad one?

While there are some obvious signs, such as spelling and grammar, other things you must consider are; who the content is aimed at, whether it is serving a purpose and if the content has been properly optimised. There is a lot more that goes into making a good piece of content than you might realise, which is why having the ability to create something that is equally as attractive to an audience and search engines is arguably the most valuable commodity of any Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy.

Research

As with anything, research comes first. A good piece of content simply isn’t created from thin air – there has to be a certain amount of preparation that happens before even a single word is written. Just like constructing a building, you would not lay a brick without any designs in place.

Depending on the purpose of your content, your research needs to focus on what your competitors are doing and what your customers are searching for. By marrying these up, not only will you ensure that your content covers all points, but will hopefully highlight a gap that hasn’t yet been fulfilled – this should help to set your page apart, giving you an advantage in the eyes of search engines and potential customers.

Finding out what customers are asking for is the most important part of producing good content for SEO. You can have one of the most compelling and well-written articles on your website but, unless it is optimised correctly, it probably won’t rank well in the search results…at least not for what you would want it to, anyway. By finding and identifying any queries and/or keywords relevant to your content that have a good volume of searches (and, hopefully, little competition), these can and should feature (sparingly) in your content.

Planning

Once the research has been completed, the next step is to plan your piece of content. Here, you should decide on a format and, ideally, a rough word count. This will help you to ensure that the content not only fits on the page but looks good whilst doing so – this is important if you are considering adding any additional videos and/or images to provide extra value (more on this later).

Devising a plan or, in this case, a content brief will help to ensure that no key parts are missed out. Could you imagine spending all that time conducting research, only to realise that much of it was not used? That would be annoying. This is especially important if the person conducting research is not going to be the one writing it, meaning that creating a detailed brief is key.

A content brief should include:

• Title/Topic
• Word count
• Keywords
• Purpose (such as whether it is promotional, informational, or designed to drive engagement)
• Linked pages (other pages on the website you want to be linked in the post)
• Key points to cover
• Any additional information that will help the writer

If possible, the brief should also include a design layout consisting of any key features and/or buttons and where on the page that these will be. This can help to visualise how the content will look on the page, as well as helping to ensure that passages of text are not abruptly broken up which can harm user experience, which is one of Google’s key ranking factors.

Writing

So, here we are. Now that we have conducted research and created a detailed plan, we can get started on creating the content. If you are guilty of sitting down at your keyboard and starting a piece of content by typing a few words and seeing where they take you, we hope that this post has already been an eye-opener for you – and has highlighted some of the reasons why your content has not been performing well up until now.

With all the key information to include in a post, all that is left is to bring it all together in a neatly gift-wrapped article. Pretty simple because, after all, all the hard work has already been done, right? Wrong!

The work of a talented writer should never be underestimated. To be able to write a piece of content that not only informs but holds the audience’s attention is an art that is so often disregarded. You can have the best business in the world but poor content on your website will see you miss out on sales to your competitors, all of whom have websites with beautifully written content that educates and entertains, along with correct spelling and grammar in all the right places.

If you would not consider yourself to be a strong writer, you should seek out the services of someone who is. This is the part where we tell you that Siteminders have a team of fantastic writers (if you have read up until now, we have proven our point) that can transform your website’s content.

Images and Video

Just as there is more than one way to crack an egg, there is more than one type of content that will rank on Google. To accompany your eloquently written passages, the careful use of images and videos that add value to the text (as well as to break up longer pieces into smaller, more digestible chunks of text) can also help your website to climb the search rankings.

We have already mentioned that search engines such as Google consider user experience as a ranking factor, so if you are worried about retaining the attention of your audience with an extra-long article, you might want to break that up with an image or video. It is important to consider what content you choose to use, meaning that any image or video should be relevant to the rest of the page.

For example, if you are producing a how-to guide, you can utilise any images or video to bring your text to life. Remember, not every user of your website learns best by reading, so this is your opportunity to appeal to other learning styles by offering visuals such as diagrams, infographics, pictures of what something should look like and step-by-step videos.

Not only can images and videos help the page in which they are on to rank, but they can rank in their own right. Image and video searches are also hugely popular amongst users and, when associated with relevant keywords, your images and videos can act as another channel in which to bring potential customers to your business.

Don’t Be Afraid to Update Your Content

Unlike with forms of print media, where your words are forever etched in stone (or ink), uploaded web content is made so you can update and alter your content accordingly. This means that if you have a piece of content on your website that you feel is underperforming and/or could be altered to serve another purpose, you can do whatever you want with it.

This is useful in the case of any pages that could require periodic updates, such as any seasonal campaigns or offers on your website. Rather than creating a new page every time, updating the content on your page not only maintains a clean sitemap but means that you can retain the authority that the page has gained since its original publication.

When you have a page that is ranking well, you are far better updating the content rather than trying to rank a completely different page for the same keywords. If you create a new page and either delete or forget about an old page that was performing well, you risk losing the rankings and, with that, traffic of your original page and failing to replicate that with the new page.

Maintaining Content

If your website has a blog (and if it doesn’t, it should), analysing old content is something that we would recommend doing. If you find content that isn’t performing well and is, effectively, just sitting there doing nothing, there could be an opportunity to combine several posts into one.

Many websites are guilty of having old posts with short word counts that only cover a small portion of what the user is looking for. It may just be that you have several posts that, when stitched together, could form a single piece of content that will perform well in the search rankings. Some might see this as cheating, but there is no point in having pages of content that aren't doing anything when you can transform them into something that does. It’s just good housekeeping.

As you can see, there is a lot more that goes into making good content than simply sitting at the computer for an hour and bashing out a chunk of text. It takes time and effort to produce content that serves its purpose of ranking in the search engines and answering the queries of the user. If you are not willing to go to these lengths, we can assure you that your competition is – and that is where your potential customers are going, as well as existing customers if you don’t act quickly.

One of the common questions that we get asked by business owners is why should they take their business online? While the obvious answer is that we are living in the 21st century and almost everyone is online, some still take a little bit more convincing.

In the present day, it is crazy to think that there are still some businesses operating without even a morsel of an online presence. No website, no social media and barely even a directory listing. In a world where the days of actively window shopping has made way for scouring the latest deals online, operating solely on print advertising and word of mouth is a dangerous game to be playing. Quite simply, unless you act soon, your business’ days are numbered if you lack any online presence.

No Website, No Trust

A study in 2017 found that 30% of consumers will not consider buying from a business that lacks a dedicated website. Straight away, that’s almost a third of your potential customers gone. It's this group who are ready to buy and looking for an online retailer offering the product or service they need, often with next-day delivery in the case of a physical product.

In the eyes of the modern consumer, if your business does not have a website then that is cause for immediate alarm bells. Questions about the legitimacy of your business are raised –  is there is an issue with the product you are selling? How can they be sure that your business won’t have suddenly left town? Having a dedicated website gives your customers peace of mind, as well as providing them with a means in which to contact you with any queries either before or after purchase.

Effectively, without a website, your business is no more trusted than a seller at a car boot sale, regardless of the quality of your products and/or service.

But What About the Costs?

Yes, building and hosting a website does cost money but when compared to the sales that your business is losing by not having a dedicated website, it barely charts. With Content Management Systems (CMSs) such as WordPress, designed to offer a quick and easy platform, it doesn’t have to cost much time or money to take your business online.

For businesses looking to sell online, you might be concerned that you don’t have the manpower or the technical capability to manage an online store. Once again, WordPress is your friend, with the open platform offering a range of plugins that can be easily integrated into your website. One such plugin is WooCommerce, which installs everything you need to create an online shop on your website with easy to manage admin area and product creation.

Hopefully, once you take your business online, you will see such a surge in sales that you might need some help taking care of things from a website perspective. This is something that we are happy to offer as part of our digital marketing packages, leaving you with ample time to fulfil those orders.

Do I Need Social Media?

Yes! Even with a dedicated website, having a presence on social media is still a must. When you consider that 78% of consumers in America discovered new retail products on Facebook, having a strong social presence is arguably even more important than the website itself (they are both important).

Consumers find businesses via social media, directly and indirectly, whether they are actively searching for them or someone on their feed shares a post relating to a business or product in some way. The opportunities presented by social media are a business’ dream when it comes to selling not only its products and/or services but also its image and vision.

Social media users want to engage with brands that they can connect with, that share the same values as they do. The more they engage with your business on social media, the more likely they are to convert from a sales perspective, which is the ultimate goal of any social media marketing campaign.

If you are not overly familiar with social media, there are three main platforms that you should at least be aware of. The platforms are Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, which boast an impressive 44.84 million, 24.46 million and 17.75 million users respectively in the United Kingdom. If your business cannot be found on any of these three social media platforms, you can guarantee that your competitors can and that they are engaging with your potential customers.

Getting Found Online

While you may have heard the famous saying ‘if you build it, they will come’, that isn’t strictly true when online. Actually, that isn’t true at all. Not even slightly.

You can have the greatest website in the world, but if no one can find it then what is the point? Think of it as having a shop with fantastic décor, well-organised shelves and all the latest products for your customers ready to buy, only that the shop is hidden away in a dark side alley which no one goes down. That is pretty much the equivalent of building a website but doing no work in the way of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to it.

Rather than being down a dark alley with no traffic apart from the odd person who has taken a wrong turn along the way, SEO puts your business right on the busy high street for hundreds and thousands of consumers to find. Ranking on page one of Google is the equivalent of having your shop right in the busiest part of town, only that all those people outside of the store are looking for exactly what you have to offer.

How does that happen? When your website is optimised to target keywords that are relevant to your business, products and, most importantly, your customers, your website’s search rankings will begin to improve. If and when your website appears on page one, this will often spark an upturn in traffic as more and more people can find you – an audience that, without a website at all, you may never have reached.

For more information on how Siteminders can help take your business online, opening a new door of opportunity to appeal to new potential customers, please get in contact with our team today.

With the world of social media constantly changing and evolving, knowing which platform is best for you and your business can be difficult. The big three social media websites are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, meaning that if your business isn’t to be found anywhere on any of these channels, you are already well behind the game.

Other notable social channels that you cannot afford to overlook include YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tik Tok and Reddit. Not all of these will apply to your business or your potential customers, but at the same time, there is no harm in, at the very least, having a presence.

Why Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are Musts

These social channels are the big three in the world of social media for a reason. In the United Kingdom alone, Facebook boasts over 44 million users, with 24 million residents on Instagram and a further 17 million on Twitter. Those are numbers not to be ignored and, with each of those channels offering differing capabilities, your business can reach out and engage with potential customers in a variety of exciting ways.

Facebook is primarily used by its users to connect with friends and family, but its users constantly engage with and look up businesses through the platform. Furthermore, arguably more so than any other social media, Facebook offers a far more precise means of targeting potential customers through Facebook Ads, where you can easily set your audience based on location and interests.

Twitter and Instagram, meanwhile, offer slightly different styles of social feeds. On Twitter, users can choose to follow accounts and topics (or hashtags) in which to engage with. Instagram is much the same, but on a far more visual basis which makes it a fantastic platform for businesses that offer aesthetically pleasing products or services in which to share their work.

What About the Others?

All social media platforms have their pros and cons. Here, we will look at exactly what some of the other social channels have to offer for your business.

LinkedIn

If your business upholds a corporate and formal tone, utilising LinkedIn will be highly beneficial. As opposed to simply posting from a company account, users on LinkedIn are constantly looking to connect with other professionals, meaning you are far likelier to find success by using an account set up in your own name to post about the company and what you are doing – sharing success stories and advice always goes down well here.

Pinterest

Pinterest is very similar to Instagram in the sense that it is a very visual social media platform. Users generally share ideas with one another, ‘pinning’ posts to their personal boards where they can refer to it later. Numerous bloggers utilise Pinterest to share informational pieces and, utilised correctly, can result in a great deal of traffic to your website.

Reddit

From a commercial standpoint, Reddit is probably the hardest social media to crack. This is because its userbase does not come to engage with businesses and the slightest scent of spam or overt self-promotion is soon deleted or ridiculed.  Reddit is such a powerful social tool because when a link to a page is shared in the right place, your website can benefit from high amounts of traffic for days after. The best part of Reddit is that with thousands of channels, known as ‘subreddits’, businesses operating in almost any sector will be relevant in one niche or another on the website.

YouTube

You might be forgiven for believing that the only way to make money on this channel is by being a YouTuber, which is a type of social influencer. However, you would be very wrong as YouTube provides an excellent platform to share ideas and promotional material which can then be posted on other social platforms. Think of YouTube as a search engine in its own right – how many times have you searched on YouTube looking for a ‘how-to’ guide? If your company has the capability of producing similar content, then creating and sharing that on YouTube can expand your reach to a new audience you never knew existed.

Snapchat

Snapchat targets a considerably younger audience than the other forms of social media we have already mentioned, with the majority of its userbase aged between 13 and 29 years old. This probably means that if you are operating a B2B business, then Snapchat may not be for you. But, if you're heading up an online strategy for a B2C brand, particularly one with an audience that falls into Generation Z, you should look further into this platform. Originally known for its disappearing images, the features and capabilities have evolved, offering businesses new and exciting ways to reach their audience.

Tik Tok

Tik Tok, much like Snapchat, targets a younger audience through its video-sharing platform and is a firm favourite amongst social influencers. Because of this, even if businesses may not be actively on the platform themselves, through influencer marketing they can still indirectly push their products and/or services simply by featuring in an influencer’s video. People buy from people, so seeing their favourite influencer, who they trust, talk about or use a product will go some way into convincing them and winning their trust off of the back of that. Similar styles of influencer marketing are widely used across other social platforms, especially YouTube and Snapchat.

Knowing what content to post on your business’ social media accounts can be difficult and, depending on the industry and audience you are trying to reach out to, there is not a strict one-size-fits-all strategy. In saying that, you can adopt guidelines that you can change and tweak to suit the brand’s voice and, most importantly, your audience.

Don’t Be Overly Promotional

If there is one fatal error that thousands of businesses make on social media, it is almost exclusively posting promotional content. This includes content concerning new products and/or services, a sale or news about the company.

The harsh reality is that the majority of people on social media simply do not care about what your company is doing. Think of it this way, if you were to meet someone on the bus and the only thing they wanted to talk about was themselves, are you more likely to; A) listen to every word they have to say or B) get off at the next stop just to get away from them? Chances are, you would choose option B.

The same principle applies to social media. People do not want their social feeds taken up by businesses purely looking to sell. They want to follow accounts that they can connect with, that discuss issues that are important to them and not the other way around. Remember, the average size of a smartphone screen is 5.6 inches and your goal is to convince your audience why you deserve a place in their busy timeline.

The ‘Perfect’ Ratio of Content

As we highlighted at the beginning, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy that suits everyone, but there are guidelines that you can use. One of these is what is known as the 4-1-1 rule which, to the untrained eye, might appear to be a pretty rubbish football formation.

The 4-1-1 rule can be broken down as such:

• Four parts relevant content designed to entertain and/or inform your follower base, which should be regarded as potential customers, and does not exist to directly promote your business
• One part re-shared content that you did not create – this could be an article from another account or a post from a satisfied customer
• One part promotional to advertise your business, such as an introduction to a new product and/or service, news of a sale or anything else that will point potential customers to your business offering

There is nothing to say that you must stick rigidly to this rule, but it serves as a good starting block. Less than 20% of your social posts should exist for the sole purpose of advertising your business because if your followers only wanted to know about the products and/or services you offer, they would have already found your website.

Engage Your Followers

Social media is all about engagement and failing to do so completely misses the point of this valuable digital channel and risks you losing potential customers. This is why the largest brands in the world employ teams of social media assistants to oversee their accounts and the messages they receive, offering immediate customer service on the digital platform.

Even if you receive a response to a post that is not directly about your business or your products and/or services, being seen to respond and engage with your audience is still positive. This will encourage those followers to engage more with your business and, when the time comes that they require a solution you offer, your brand will be right at the forefront of their mind.

When it comes to marketing your business online, there are hundreds of free online tools you can use as part of your digital marketing efforts. Needless to say, some are better than others and there is, of course, those that draw you in with free versions with the sole intention of encouraging you to sign up to a premium account.

Unless you are a dedicated digital marketing professional, finding the correct tools to use can be a daunting task. Fear not, because here we have listed some of our favourite free tools that we would recommend for any business looking to improve their online presence.

Quite simply, no. Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising will not have any direct effect on your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) efforts as these are two different channels of online marketing.

The best way to explain the difference is that while PPC is designed to achieve quick results through campaigns that can be switched on and off, SEO is a long-term strategy that will benefit your online presence without the need for paying for impressions.

Why PPC Does Not Affect SEO

It is important that we distinguish between not helping SEO and not having any effect on SEO. PPC will not directly help your SEO campaign as it does not have any effect on a website’s SEO, good or bad. This is because Google and other search engines do not take PPC ad placements into consideration from an SEO-perspective, so whatever placements – whether they be at the top of a search results page or on a social channel – will not count towards your rankings.

Should I Run Both a PPC and SEO Campaign?

This is a question that can only really be answered based on your own individual needs. However, while it is true that PPC does not have any direct effect on your SEO efforts, it can have an indirect one.

Allow us to explain.

The more often a user sees your brand, the more likely they are to click on it. This means that, if a user sees one of your PPC adverts and were to then find your website through an organic search, there is an increased chance they will open the link, thus improving your click-through rate, even if your website is not necessarily ranking at number one.

At the very most, there is an indirect knock-on effect on your SEO efforts but paying for PPC adverts on their own will not improve your website’s search rankings. PPC and SEO campaigns can complement each other with the correct know-how, which is something that professional digital marketers spend years practising and perfecting.

Keyword Opportunities

Another way in which doing PPC can indirectly help your SEO campaign is through identifying new keyword opportunities that you may not have considered. Google’s Keyword Planner helps the user to identify new keywords to create PPC adverts and this feature is often utilised for SEO-purposes.

This means that, in theory, when you identify a keyword that would work well for your business but your SEO campaign has not yet targeted it, you can use PPC to appear for that keyword whilst working on optimising your site to rank in the search results. This is an example as to how PPC and SEO can complement each other.

Consider the Reasons for Wanting to Run a PPC Campaign

Before starting any PPC campaign, you should consider your reasons for wanting to do so. If you are hoping to improve your website’s SEO, your time and effort will be far better spent directly working on your website's content and user experience. If you are looking to improve your business’ online presence in highly competitive areas and/or gain a short-term push, then PPC is a viable option.

Even if you wouldn’t consider yourself to be a digital marketing expert, you likely know that keywords play a pivotal part when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). For the avoidance of doubt, despite outdated practices that were widely used some 10 or more years ago, stuffing your content full of keywords is not the way to rank on Google.

However, carefully placed instances of a keyword in your content can and does help your website to rank higher on Google. The trick is to know which keywords to use, which is not always an easy task. You need to find the right balance between searches and difficulty – a keyword with high search volume is likely to be highly competitive, while keywords with little competition may not have any search volume.

Keyword Research Tools

There are several tools available to aid your keyword research, the most popular of which is arguably Google’s Keyword Planner, which is used in conjunction with Google Ads. Tools such as this will help you to identify additional keyword and broad match opportunities alongside your base keyword and narrow your strategy down to the best keywords to focus on, in terms of search volume and difficulty.

David vs. Goliath

For smaller businesses competing against large global brands, identifying the right keywords to use is crucial to your digital marketing campaign. The reality is that some keywords are dominated by these big brands that invest large amounts of resource into their website’s SEO so, instead of fighting a losing battle, you look for opportunity elsewhere.

For example, while search results for ‘DIY tools’ are dominated by brands such as B&Q and Amazon, seeking out broad alternatives that those sites aren’t necessarily optimised for is your opening. This is an example of how SEO can level the playing field for small businesses competing against large brands.

Local Keywords

Another way that SEO and, more specifically, finding the right keywords levels the playing field is through local keywords. While searching for ‘table and chairs’ presents a selection of large businesses, refining that search so as it is localised presents a list of local businesses – an opportunity that should not be ignored.

Local keywords are not only less competitive, but the users searching are more likely to want exactly what you are offering. For example, if someone is searching for ‘table and chairs Newcastle’, there is a strong chance that they are seeking a seller of table and chairs that are local to Newcastle. While the search volume will be lower than the generic ‘table and chairs’ search term, there is a much higher chance of converting that traffic into a sale.

Optimisation

When you hear the term ‘optimised’ in an SEO sense, it means that a website and/or a specific page has been designed to target a specific keyword or group of keywords, as it is possible to optimise for more than one keyword at a time.

Keywords in PPC

As well as for SEO-purposes, keywords can also be used as part of a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign, especially when it comes to Google Ads. The adverts that you see at the top of Google’s search results have been targeted via keywords, designed to appear based on searches that are likely to convert.

Much the same as for regular (organic) search results, keywords with higher search volume come with greater difficulty. Instead of optimising the advert to appear higher and/or more often, bids are placed. Simply, the higher the competition, the more expensive the advert will be to be displayed. By being smarter with the keywords you target, your PPC adverts will not cost as much to show while still being put in front of users that are likely to convert.