I have read numerous articles on PPC vs. Natural Search.  Each casts its vote in favour of one or the other or offers scenarios where one is more effective that the other.  And I suppose what we at Quirk have been doing is trying to figure the optimal mix of the two for our clients with a specific focus on max ROI in PPC and increased rankings for SEO.  But we don’t look at the synergy of the two and the performance of the combined efforts.

This report has sparked my interest. Basically, it says that PPC and SEO are synergistic i.e. when added together you get a 1 + 1 = 3 scenario.  In the test campaign, when running a PPC campaign alongside a SEO campaign, they found that clicks rose by 92%; the number of site actions by 45%; page views increased by 44%; site visitors climbed by 41%; and time spent onsite went up 39%. 

That’s quite something!

On an instinctual level, it makes sense. In researching for some copy for Quirk recently (and in consideration of my own search habits), we ended up having a long discussion about how top ranking sites are considered to be industry leaders. Imagine if a site appears twice amongst the top search results - they must be the industry dominators.

The benefit of running both simultaneously would include increased lead generation, brand awareness & building and occupying space which would otherwise be occupied by a competitor. Even if the PPC campaign is not running at a major ROI, it could still be worth running it, if the whole marketing effort's ROI benefits from it.