Key Takeaways from 5 PPC and SEO Trends

Last week gShift and Acquisio joined forces to present the 5 PPC and SEO Trends webinar, attended by more than 700 marketers.

The aim of the presentation was to help both SEO and PPC professionals get a better understanding of current trends and incorporate them across SEO and PPC strategies.

Of the 5 trends included in the webinar, here are the key takeaways for digital marketers

Making Changes to Mobile

As Krista LaRiviere, co-founder and CEO of gShift, put it, there are two truths related to mobile marketing.

  1. Your brand and content are discovered differently when someone searches on a desktop device and a mobile device
  2. You’re likely unaware of what those differences are

To understand the differences, look at analytics at a keyword level for both mobile and desktop devices. You will notice that the same keywords have different ranking on different devices.

Because mobile users pay for data, as Chris Doran, VP Marketing at Acquisio explained, every mobile search counts and people are much more direct with their searches – they have more of an immediate need. That means you should adjust which keywords you target, adjusting bids for local searches and more direct terms, to best respond to this mobile need.

Consider Voice

Keywords are changing because of the integration of new search methods. One of the most common, yet important change is voice search.

A study from Google concluded that everyone, across all age groups, has used voice search at least once.

If more people are using voice search on mobile devices that means rather than searching “flower store Honolulu” someone would say “I’m looking for a flower store in Honolulu,” these small differences will affect the keywords you bid on or the content you create with PPC and SEO and even change the top results for the each respective search.

Hop Onboard the Native Ads Train

Right now, native ads offer high ROA for marketers, so the appeal is huge for advertisers. But as Chris said, “we need to be responsible as marketers to make sure that we provide ads that integrate seamlessly into the online experience or else ultimately we won’t continue seeing the high performance or ROI that most advertisers see now.”

One way to ensure your native ad will be effective is to use SEO content, as Krista suggested.

People don’t typically connect native ads and SEO, but you can’t do SEO or Native Ads without strong content. If you see that content is doing well organically, you can use that post as a Native Ad, so your SEO content doubles as a paid piece of content to attract more eyeballs to your website. SEO strategy should help inform and drive native ad campaigns.

Video Ads are the Answer

Video Ads are the new hot topic for agencies and advertisers in 2015, and it’s clear why.

Krista conducted an experiment to see how quickly Video Ads indexed on Google.

Once a video was uploaded to YouTube, she saw that it could be indexed and discovered within 15 minutes! That opportunity is too big to miss for advertisers.

Looking toward paid advertising, video ads can be used across multiple formats including native advertising, and to help build up cross channel promotion.

Video offer marketers a method to create a cross channel story that is engaging for the target audience. Vlogs, for example, are a great way of sharing information in a secondary format to draw in more attention.

People want to watch videos, particularly on mobile where reading is less than ideal due to screen size and scrolling, so not only will video content help optimize your message for mobile, it will help index your content on Google.

Final Takeaway

The biggest trend, according to Krista LaRiviere, is that the lines are continuing to blur between the traditional pillars of marketing – paid, owned and earned – but at the center of those pillars is content.

paid owned earned

A strong content marketing strategy incorporating the main trends (including mobile, voice, native ads and video ads) and promoted by a paid technique (search ads), owned technique (content on your own website) and earned technique (SEO, social and email marketing) is key to engaging audiences effectively.

When all of these techniques and trends come together with relevant content, that is when you will achieve the highest ROAS.

For more information, watch the full webinar here.

Jillian Zacchia

Jillian Zacchia

Jill is a professional writer, editor and social media procrastinator. With a degree in Literature and Communications from McGill, she started her journalism career writing about lifestyle and entertainment for teen magazines, and after dabbling with wedding and travel writing she began the transition towards content creation for start ups, marketing and tech companies.

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