Which search engine marketing strategy should one concentrate on, free or paid? You should think of search marketing like a sandwich: it just doesn’t work with only one slice of bread!

For increased traffic and sales combine the power of organic (free) and pay-per-click search engine marketing. Together, they will help you reach your goals of more traffic and sales in both the short AND long term.

The trick is to use both strategies so they build on each other.

Step 1. Do your keyword research and then build a content-rich site around keywords your market is searching on.

Step 2. Now add on some pay-per-click search engine advertising; each ad should be built on a single keyword. Use PPC (pay-per-click) to bring more visitors to your website then measure your sales per visitor this is called your sales conversion rate. Your PPC campaign will show you very quickly which keywords bring in the most visitors and which result in the most salesand, of course, which ones are duds.

Step 3. Take thekeywords that are performing the best for you from your PPC campaign and edit your website to include those keywords. By emphasizing them in your content and code, you’ll start ranking well for those keywords in the organic (free) listings (the regular listings that come up when someone uses a search engine).

You can even build landing pages when you find a group of top-performing keywords, you can build a page around them that contains specific information to appeal to searchers who are using those keywords.

Pay-per-click will bring first time visitors to your site for the answers to their search questions. By finding out what works in PPC, you can adjust the keywords on your site to get a higher search engine ranking; over time this will build up your free traffic.

And here’s a bonus! If you can get both your PPC ads and your organic listings on the same page of the search results, you’ll have a search engine marketing strategy that’s far greater than the sum of its parts.

Search engine optimization and PPC, with a delicious keyword filling it’s a search sandwich!