A marketing mix is a combination of marketing techniques and methods to generate an effective marketing campaign. While SEO offers inexpensive and highly targeted traffic it is not the only effective method of online marketing that your website can benefit from. PPC, or Pay Per Click, is paid search marketing and it enables you to quickly gain a prominent position in some of the most competitive and popular keywords for your site.

What Is A Marketing Mix

Traditional businesses and marketers have long understood the pitfalls of relying on a single source of leads for their business. If that source dries up and creates no more leads, then the business will gain no more new customers and, over a prolonged period, it will need to close. An online marketing mix attempts to avoid the same potential pitfalls by diversifying a marketing portfolio.

Even within SEO, it can pay dividends to diversify. Google is certainly the most popular search engine and the one that demands the most attention but Yahoo and MSN Live should not be forgotten. Targeting a range of keywords also helps ensure that your site continues to retain traffic even if one keyword becomes less popular or your rankings slip for that particular search term.

The Benefits SEO Offers To A Marketing Mix

Search engine optimization can generate a lot of targeted traffic for very little cost. The targeted visitors generated through good search engine optimisation are more prone to perform the desired action while on your site. While continued SEO is required to maintain the best rankings, this can ensure that a web page or web site continues to receive volumes of traffic over an extended period of time.

Combining SEO With PPC In A Marketing Mix

The single biggest drawback of search engine optimisation is that it takes time and there are no short cuts. In contrast, PPC can create traffic as soon as a campaign is established. By combining PPC and SEO, your website can enjoy immediate traffic while building an organic source of traffic well into the future. Another advantage of combining the two is that if your site drops down the organic rankings you can still rely on PPC traffic while you attempt to remedy the situation.

Conclusion

Search engine optimisation is often looked on as being the best source of traffic for a website because it offers cheap and targeted visitors. However, it can take time to build a good basis of organic search traffic and rankings can fluctuate wildly in the search engines. By combining SEO with other online marketing methods such as PPC you can ensure that you continue to retain traffic even if your rankings do drop. You will also enjoy the traffic created by a Pay Per Click campaign while search engine traffic builds.