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Why a PPC Campaign Might Be Your Best SEO Move

By Snap Agency August 31, 2017

It can be easy for even the most experienced digital marketers to get caught up in a single tactic. We can lose our creativity and then become worried when that tactic becomes more difficult as your target websites reduce.

One of the best things that you can do in this situation is to take a step back and look at other, more imaginative link building tactics. One such tactic is to use a PPC campaign like an SEO link building strategy. In this article, we’ll look at how you can do that and why it can be beneficial.

What is PPC?

For those who don’t know what a PPC campaign is, PPC stands for Pay Per Click and refers to ads on Facebook, Google, Forums, Websites, etc. that you pay for per click on the ad.

Most of these ads will be in the form of a traditional banner ad that you see on the side of websites, but may also be an overlay, a popup or an ad before a YouTube video.

Readers Often Share Content

The first reason why PPC campaigns can often result in links and therefore better rankings is that readers often share the content that they enjoy. If you create a mind-blowing piece of content, you’re going to market it until your fingers fall off and PPC is just another marketing tactic in the same way that you would publish it to industry related forums.

If you’re going to use the PPC campaign to target readers, then you should consider what types of readers share content most frequently. You might figure that people that use forums share content and so you use a retargeting pixel on a forum and then market to them around the web.

This is an innovative tactic that very few people are using, but rather than paying for a CPM (Cost per 1000) ad, you can pay for a CPM pixel to be installed. This way you can track all of the users on a specific website and then retarget them with ads on other websites.

In practice this could mean you ask a forum owner to install a pixel, then you retarget those forum users with ads about your content on Facebook. The idea is that these people are relevant traffic who may become customers, but they’re also forum users who might share the content.

Targeting Reporters and Owners

The second method for an SEO focused PPC campaign is our favorite and was partially hijacked from Gary Vaynerchuk. The idea is only to target reporters, blog owners, contributors and anyone else who writes about your topic.

With this level of precision, you can create an ad that is personal to them. You might even take it to the next level and only target reporters at a specific company, this way you can create an ad that mentions their company and will likely have a higher conversion rate.

The beauty of this tactic is in the specific targeting that puts the ad in front of people that write about your topic on a regular basis.

Some would argue that you could simply send an email to the person, but if you’ve ever worked as a reporter, you know that those emails rarely get read.

Instead, you’re able to produce ads directly for that group of people at a very small cost. These ads will encourage them to read your mind-blowing piece of content and then report on it.

If you use this tactic to target reporters and owners of authoritative websites, you’ll be able to earn links from websites that you would never have been able to get featured on before. The great thing about these links is that smaller websites often copy them. This can mean multiple links rather than just a single one.

Is this Really that Powerful?

Understandably, some people will argue that this is a cool tactic but that it isn’t that powerful and it’s relatively time-consuming. We’d agree with that, to an extent. But if you’ve been working on a simple campaign for a long period it’s easy to burn through a huge list of target websites.

At this point, you need to expand your range and try different tactics to continue to build links to the same website. Given that, this tactic can result in some baller links and also genuine traffic to your page.

Conclusion

Too many SEOs get trapped into the mentality that there are only a few tactics that work and that they need to grind them out for months on end. The truth is that the most successful SEOs rely on creativity to stay ahead of the pack.

Using innovative tactics like this is a great way to differentiate yourself from the hoards of other businesses who are asking these reporters for the same links.

If you’d like to hear more about how we can create a content marketing strategy that’s tailored to your business, get in touch with us today.