By Guest Blogger, Sofia Ribeiro from Kiwano Marketing

Last month, I had the pleasure of meeting Geoff Geiling, one of the owners of Chaka Market Bridge – a social business that brings the power of the global market place to artisans in Nicaragua while providing them with a fair income. We connected because they’re looking to optimize their website. We exchanged a couple of emails on SEO 101 and something caught my attention: they weren’t aware that SEO can actually improve their pay-per-click (PPC) performance. So here’s a blog post that hopefully will provide further information on this topic.

Perhaps the first step here is to clarify what optimization means. Website optimization means to adapt your website so that it’s more likely to get you the results you want. In most cases, using a combination of many optimization techniques together – such as improving your copy, tweaking your meta data, increasing the number of backlinks and identifying and embedding keywords in your website content – is the best way to improve the overall performance of your website and increase your Page Rank. By optimizing your website, you’re not just improving your organic search ranking; you’re basically rendering your website more relevant to your users – which is exactly what search engines look for when evaluating an PPC campaign:

“For AdWords ads, the most important factor in relevance is the ad’s quality, which we measure with a metric called ‘Quality Score.’ The higher your Quality Score, the higher your ad will be ranked and the lower your costs will be. Quality Score is based on your keyword’s click-through rate (CTR); the relevance of your ad text, keyword, and landing page; and several other factors.”

“Landing page quality is influenced by the usefulness and relevance of information provided on the page, ease of navigation, load time, how many links are on the page, and more. Improving landing page quality can help you gain the trust of your customers and, therefore, keep them coming back to your site. You’ll also make it easier for visitors to make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or perform any other desired action.”

What Does This All Mean?

One of the first steps when starting your SEO efforts (after identifying your goals) is to discover the right keywords for you, and then embed them in your website. Once you start optimizing your website, you will be able to have a good idea of which keywords are working for you, as well as which pages are performing better, enabling you to understand users preferences and navigation patterns – critical information for a pay-per-click campaign. Provided with this knowledge, you are better positioned to boost your PPC performance and rip a higher return-on-investment.

Regardless whether you’re optimizing your website for organic search results or for a pay-per-click campaign, the same principles apply: relevance IS king.