PPC and SEO: The perfect partnership for a bootstrapped business?
With the rise of digital media, it’s never been easier or faster to start a business. In just a few clicks on a website, you can have a fully-fledged limited company up and running – but what then? In the age of the “bootstrap” business – i.e. those started with limited resources – it’s all about doing things in a cost-effective way. When it comes to digital marketing, there are two things which can work in perfect harmony: PPC and SEO. Let’s find out how.
The role of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising
If you’d just started a brand-new business which had absolutely zero online profile, how would you go about promoting it? For most people, the simple answer is PPC, or Pay Per Click advertising. By paying to dominate the search results for key terms, you can ensure that you capture the market you’re targeting. This can be done with a website of any age and is a great way to get those all-important eyeballs on a new business proposition. The only problem? PPC can be costly in the long term because you’re paying for every visitor to your website – whether they convert or not. And that’s where our good friend SEO comes in…
Search Engine Optimisation for bootstrapped businesses
Funnily enough, the aims of PPC and SEO really aren’t that different. After all, both are tools to drive traffic to your website. The big difference? SEO is practically free. Of course, your time and resources are required, but, unlike PPC, there are no direct financial costs for SEO. Put simply, Search Engine Optimisation is the art of managing your website in such a way that it ranks highly in search results. This can include tweaking code elements like headers, adding metadata, and – perhaps most importantly – publishing great content which makes people want to visit.
Making the transition from PPC to SEO
When it comes to measuring the success of your digital marketing, the biggest cost is sure to be your PPC budget. That’s why your strategy should always be to phase out your reliance on PPC with a move to organic SEO strategies. By doing this, you’ll find that the value of each of your conversions (i.e. leads turned to customers) suddenly begins to skyrocket. The less you pay for acquisition, the better your bottom line – that’s just common sense. And it’s the secret to successful Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO).
If you’ve found PPC to be a crutch for your business, you could reduce cost and boost profits by investing more time into SEO. Want to learn more? Get in touch with the Epic team today and we’ll show you how we can help.