Why the Best B2B SEO Strategy Should Include PPC for Success

Can pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) go together? Yes, and a smart B2B SEO agency considers it the perfect recipe to increase conversions. This post lists the top three reasons you should include paid ads in your organic marketing campaigns:

• The B2B sales cycle is longer.
• PPC helps you collect more comprehensive market data.
• Both paid ads and SEO support each other.

Read the article below and learn more about these B2B advantages and the strategies to achieve them. Let’s go!

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1. The B2B Sales Cycle Is Longer

B2B SEO differs from B2C SEO in many aspects. These include the sales cycle, which is often longer if you target other businesses. This is because:

• B2B markets have many decision makers. 
• The users are sometimes not the buyers.
• The transaction usually involves a huge budget and long-term commitment. 
• These businesses must comply with certain industry guidelines and even federal rules.
• The company might decide to purchase according to their budget cycle. 

Suppose you are a healthcare software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider offering AI-based electronic medical records. An urgent care facility interested in it will convene a team of doctors, IT experts, administrative leaders, and perhaps even board members.  Each has its own set of concerns. Doctors focus on user-friendliness, while IT professionals scrutinize integration and security. Administrators would consider cost, compliance, and operational efficiency. This alone often leads to extended dialogues, demos, and pilot projects.  Combining B2B SEO and PPC helps shorten the sales cycle by speeding up your online visibility and credibility. Optimizing your pages for free traffic reduces marketing costs but is often a long-term investment. Reaching its benefits usually takes six months, further delaying the sales process. Well-crafted paid ads reduce the time it takes to generate revenues or increase conversions. You can write and publish copies on the same day.  It also helps showcase your expertise and trustworthiness, two critical factors B2Bs search for in vendors and partners. Consider dynamic ads on search engines and social media.  In these campaigns, the publishers use algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) to match descriptions, landing pages, and headlines to your target audience. In turn, it improves your ads’ user experience (UX) and delivers the right message. 

2. PPC Helps You Collect Comprehensive Market Data

A B2B SEO agency needs relevant, timely, and accurate data to design a customer-driven optimization plan. Although these businesses often have many types of data, they fail to gather and analyze it properly for many reasons: 

• Different departments might use separate systems or silos to collect and store information. 
• The sales cycles involve multiple touchpoints, and not all are easily measurable. For example, how do you track conversions from a shared blog post?
• B2Bs usually have fewer customers but higher transaction values. Data sets are usually smaller, so detecting meaningful patterns or trends is harder.
• Huge organizations usually use many marketing and sales tools, some of which are legacy or proprietary. Curating information from various sources to get a holistic view can be technologically challenging and resource intensive.
• Data inaccuracies could creep in because of manual entry, outdated platforms, or poor data entry protocols.
• Some B2B companies lack the in-house talent or resources to analyze data effectively.

PPC helps you gather actionable marketing insights quickly by:

• Centralizing data from PPC campaigns.
• Getting immediate feedback on which stages of the sales funnel are most responsive to certain messaging or keywords.
• Offering precise tracking and consistent data.
• Identifying the right attribution metrics.
• Balancing quantitative and qualitative data, such as clickthrough rates (CTRs) and social media engagement, to shape more holistic SEO strategies.

The data also helps you effectively manage your budget. Although digital marketing spending has declined, it is closer to pre-pandemic levels than in 2021. In other words, your competitors have spent more money over the last two years to beat you.   However, what if your business still feels the effects of the health crisis and economic depression? What if cash flow is tight?  PPC offers instant feedback, allowing you to quickly test and refine your strategies. SEO builds a foundation for sustained online visibility. 

3. Both Paid Ads and SEO Support Each Other

PPC and optimization might be worlds apart, but their strategies are often interrelated and support each other. Optimization enhances the bottom line by reducing click costs and increasing conversions if paid ads speed up brand visibility.  For example, good B2B SEO raises the ad quality score (AQS), a rating that determines your copy’s effectiveness against your competitors. When your numbers are high, you often get to bid for highly competitive keywords at a lower price and position your ads in better areas of the search results (ad rank). Your AQS, which is between 1 and 10, considers three factors:

• Landing page experience. 
• Keyword relevance.
• Expected CTR.

B2B SEO influences these three in the following ways:

• It emphasizes creating relevant, useful, and original content, especially when running “Your Money, Your Life” (YMYL) pages.
• SEO best practices include optimizing the website’s structure, ensuring mobile responsiveness, and improving page-load speed. All these enrich UX. 
• It targets the right keywords based on user intent. 
• A well-optimized site with high organic CTR can provide information on what headlines or descriptions resonate with users. 
• Robust SEO campaigns involve comprehensive keyword research to determine which terms users search.

For example, you are a company specializing in corporate wellness solutions. You want to partner with businesses to improve their employees’ health and productivity. You roll out an online webinar series focusing on wellness and use paid ads to target HR managers and decision makers across various industries.  After a few weeks, you analyze the ad performance data and discover that the “Incorporating Yoga for Employee Stress Management” webinars receive the highest engagement. Recognizing this demand, you expand on this topic by clustering related content.  You start developing a series of in-depth guides, case studies, and white papers. These include “The ROI of Yoga in Employee Wellness Programs,” “Case Study: How Company X Reduced Employee Burnout with Yoga,” and “Best Practices for Integrating Yoga into Corporate Wellness.”  In the process, you address the immediate demand and strengthen your position as a thought leader in corporate wellness. This content also serves as a valuable resource for HR managers looking to build a case for wellness initiatives within their organizations, making your company a preferred partner choice.

Summing Up

B2B digital marketing works best when you use PPC and SEO together. PPC gives quick results and helps gather useful data, while SEO builds a long-lasting online presence. However, combining them is tricky and challenging, especially if your team lacks enough experience in both. Grow your business with Digital Authority Partners (DAP). As a B2B SEO strategy firm, we develop customized, holistic campaigns based on data, audience, and goals.  Contact us to schedule a free consultation.