26Sep

SEO, SEM, and How to Merge the Two

Recently on the blog, we’ve been discussing how your dealership can benefit from improved performance in search engines, using specific search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM) strategies. First, we talked about best practices for SEO, and then had two articles about SEM best practices. To round out the search engine series, our Search Services Manager, Ruth Johndrow, is sharing how merging your SEO and SEM strategies can help your business top the search engine rankings. 

Here are Ruth’s top seven tips and benefits for combining SEO and SEM:

  1. First, having organic results coupled with pay-per-click (PPC) ads gives your dealership more real estate on the search results page, increasing the chances a user will click on one or the other.
  2. Being seen by potential customers on both organic and paid search results provides more credibility for your business.
  3. Your keywords will receive optimal coverage because of the nature of PPC. PPC provides immediate results, so you know what keywords users are searching for and clicking on. Using PPC will give you the ability to bid on keywords that are more difficult to obtain organic ranking for. 
  4. Utilizing one with the other creates new opportunities to test what’s best! Try using PPC to test and optimize for SEO. You can test headlines in PPC ads to determine which drives the most valuable traffic and use that for the SEO page title.
  5. Organic ranking and paid search quality scores are both based in part on the user experience of the landing page. Following SEO best practices for pages will, therefore, help drive higher quality scores and better ad placement for PPC campaigns.
  6. Technical and content page optimizations can improve the user experience and landing page relevance, leading to higher conversion rates and lower CPCs.
  7. Look at search terms match type to see whether exact match or broad and phrase matched versions tend to convert at a higher rate. Match types are chosen to give Google more or less freedom to pair the specified keywords with a user’s search. An example from Ruth is, “with an exact match, we are saying that the search query needs to be the same as the keyword we have specified, e.g., ‘JCB construction equipment’. If we choose a broad match instead, the ads may show when the search query includes synonyms such as ‘JCB construction machine’, or other variants that generally mean the same thing.” This can then influence your SEO/content strategy.

Now you have the basics to create a killer search strategy for your dealership! If you’re starting to wonder “how am I going to implement all of these best practices?” – don’t fret; Ruth and the rest of our search services team are here to help. Send us an email to marketing@commercialwebserivces.com and we’ll get you connected with a search specialist.

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