Much is written about how best to use SEO and PPC to complement each other, and the truth is that there isn’t a single ‘one size fits all’ approach that will work for every advertiser.

Sometimes a large part of the SEO strategy will revolve around generating traffic through an extensive list of very specific keywords, and sometimes the strategy will be focused around a few critical, large volume keywords.

The same can be true for PPC. Large volume keywords can cost a fortune to advertise on, putting them out of reach for many smaller advertisers, but for some advertisers, they are critical to the success or failure of the campaign.

‘The Hammer And Scalpel’ is one approach to ensuring that you get the most from your advertising budget – The Hammer is SEO, and the Scalpel is PPC.

The principal is simple – you use SEO to target a number of very large keywords (that are out of reach for your PPC budget), whilst you pick up the long tail keywords with the PPC.

Clearly, this won’t work if high rankings are impossible to achieve on the biggest keywords, perhaps if you have a new website, or the incumbent top adverts are immovable advertising colossuses (colossi?!).

But if your website has some history, then page one rankings for these keywords may certainly be achievable. Whilst you focus your SEO efforts on these keywords, PPC can be used to pick up any potential traffic on lower volume keywords.

There are a number of advantages to this approach:

• You will be represented on all of the relevant keywords, unlike an SEO-only strategy.
• You won’t have to worry about your adverts cannibalising traffic from each other.
• Your advertising spend is likely to be far less than a PPC-only strategy, targeting the same keywords.
• You’ll start getting a return on your investment far more quickly than from an SEO-only strategy.
• Your advertising spend may start to fall in the long term, as you achieve top results in SEO.
• Once you have top results in SEO, you can target new keywords, and remove these from the PPC campaign if you want to.
• You will still get a ‘halo effect’ on other keywords in SEO, as a result of improving your website’s visibility in Google on critical terms. These can, again, be removed from the PPC if you want.

Advertisers with deep pockets, or in less competitive or smaller markets, may still be better targeting everything in PPC – this solution certainly isn’t for everyone.

But if you’ve found in the past that PPC is too expensive, then a combined PPC and SEO strategy may be the perfect solution for your needs.