If your business operates primarily online, your visibility in search results is directly tied to your success or failure.

And even if your firm exists mostly in the offline world, making it easier for would-be customers to find you can mean increased sales, higher profits and better results for the bottom line.

When it comes to raising your visibility online, you have two basic choices - SEO and PPC. Standing for search engine optimization and pay per click respectively, these two online marketing methods are often viewed as competing strategies, but it is better to look at them as complementary halves of a profitable whole.

The truth is that SEO and PPC can, and should, work together. If your want your business to succeed, both online and off, you need to understand how these two intertwining strategies can be combined in new and innovative ways.

In order to understand the importance of combining both SEO and PPC for marketing, it helps to look at a real world example. Imagine you are the owner of a brand new online retail store or the seller of a unique product. As the new kid on the block, you will be competing against established players like Amazon, eBay, Etsy and the like, so generating organic search results will likely be difficult, even with the best and most expensive SEO efforts.

In this case, relying on PPC advertising would make a lot of sense, as those ads can generate the type of visibility that would be impossible with SEO and organic efforts alone. Since these paid ads appear at the top of the search results, above even the number one organic search result, your new store will get noticed, generating business and hopefully buzz as new customers come onboard.

The results from your PPC efforts can also inform and guide your future SEO strategy. As you get a feel for PPC and the results it is able to generate, you can use that information to augment your own keyword research, helping you craft a search engine strategy that will drive even greater results.

The ability of PPC advertising to inform and guide search engine optimization is an often overlooked benefit, but it can be critical to new businesses as they get started. As you get more comfortable with your overall marketing strategy, you can also test out various keywords and keyword phrases via PPC, saving the best results for your organic search and SEO efforts.

Since search engine optimization efforts can be far more costly than simply buying a batch of PPC ads, you can make the most of your marketing budget, essentially using PPC as a proving ground and using those results to drive better and better organic search results.

Last but not least, combining the paid visibility of PPC advertising with the organic results of search engine optimization (SEO) can increase your level of confidence, allowing you to gain the experience you will need to take your online marketing efforts to higher and higher levels. So stop thinking about PPC and SEO as competitors - in the world of online business these two separate marketing strategies are more like collaborators.

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