In finance marketing, generating leads can be 2-3x more expensive than in other industries and cost-per-click (CPC) rates can reach $50 or more. SEO and PPC are two powerful strategies that, when used together, can help you get more value from your marketing budget. In this guide, we’ll explain what SEO and PPC are, how they can work together specifically in the finance and fintech market.
What is SEO
SEO is a huge buzz word that’s gotten more attention recently with Google’s monopoly cases, new AI generative content on search results, and everyone under the sun DMing you on LinkedIn about your website.
But essentially SEO (especially in the finance space) is about helping your website match what Google looks for when deciding who to feature on their search results. Typically this can include making your website easy to crawl, fast, and mobile friendly. It also includes tweaking product descriptions, title tags, and website copy to match what users on Google are searching for.
What is PPC?
PPC stands for “pay per click” and refers to the advertising you see at the top and along the sides of searches on Google and Bing. It’s called “pay-per-click” because the companies that place them only pay for the ads when they are clicked—they don’t pay anything otherwise.
But PPC can also include other “pay per click” platforms like Meta, Reddit, X.com, and TikTok.
DO SEO and PPC compete for traffic?
Generally no. Having PPC ads can’t affect your site’s ranking, and your site’s ranking can’t affect your ads. But it does indirectly impact SEO, and visa versa. When you run PPC ads, they generally appear at the top of the search results — and people see PPC ads first when they conduct searches.
Could that push your organic listings down the screen, and subsequently impact the amount of clicks your organic listing gets? Maybe, but it’s negligeable. In most cases, if your ad is not featured, a competitor’s would be.
Should SEO and PPC ever be used at the same time?
So if you couple SEO with PPC, you can maximize the chances that people will click one of your listings and visit your company’s website to learn more. If someone skips past the ads and goes to the organic search results, they’ll see your business’s listing there, too.
If you think about the Google search result page as real estate, the more space you take up, the more you control the market.
How do I align SEO and PPC?
The first thing to do is get everyone in the same room. Often times, SEO, PPC, and Sales teams are siloed, which causes frustrations. The SEO team thinks the PPC team is stealing their traffic, the PPC team is frustrated the Sales team isn’t closing leads, and the Sales team complains about poor lead quality.
Sound familiar?
Here’s how to solve that major issue:
1. Work together to create a more comprehensive keyword targeting strategy
Your sales team knows what the biggest complaints, pain points, and objections are. Utilize keyword research to determine how people are phrasing those issues in search engine searches.
Next categorize those keywords into groups that the PPC team can bid against, and the SEO team can create content for. This will improve the close rate of the Sales team, and help your marketing efforts align with sales efforts.
2. Have the SEO team and the PPC team share data
The PPC team (if they’re good) will negative match keywords that are wasting ad budget. That doesn’t mean those are bad keywords, they just aren’t bottom of the funnel, converting keywords. Those are great for informational, top of funnel, educational content that SEO excels at.
Alternatively, the SEO team can share keywords they are not quite on page one for (but in the process of getting there) with the PPC team. The PPC team can then “jump the line” by bidding on those keywords.
PRO TIP: Duplicate the SEO page, so you have a strong quality score, and “noindex” it so it won’t compete with SEO traffic.
3. Engage in Cross-Channel Remarketing
Cross-channel marketing allows you to re-engage users who have visited your site via organic search but haven’t yet converted.
By tagging these visitors and then targeting them with retargeting ads based on the content they engaged with, you increase the likelihood of them returning to your site to complete a conversion.
TL;DR – What’s the point?
Integrating SEO and PPC strategies can significantly amplify the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts. By unifying these approaches, you not only enhance your search visibility but also gain deeper insights into your audience’s search behaviors. This enables you to craft more relevant content and ads that resonate with your target customers, driving higher engagement, improved conversion rates, and a stronger return on investment.
And if you include the sales team in the process, you can drastically improve the quality of your Marketing Qualified Leads and have a pipeline your sales team can actually close.