The best sites use PPC, SEO and Social Media together. Here's why!

• I'm trying to get my e-commerce client to expand outside their PPC comfort zone and embrace both SEO and social media more in their marketing plans going forward. Can you provide me some tips on how I can best get them to recognize how important a unified strategy would benefit them?

Answer: Congratulations! You've recognized a relationship that many experienced site owners still fail to grasp. It's not enough these days to rely on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns as the main provider of traffic to a Web site, no matter how much traffic these campaign may send.

On the contrary, the most successful online sites cultivate a unified strategy that makes use of sound on-page and off-page SEO strategies, that lead to the generation of social interactions with prospective customers and fans, which in turn result in those same visitors taking a firm buying action through PPC ads.

To see a visual representation of this symbiotic relationship in action take a look here:

You can see in this chart how closely interlinked SEO, social media, and PPC are in terms of a total fulfillment cycle.

Many sites that we consult with here at SearchEngineNews make use of one or two of these levels, but rarely avail themselves of a solid promotional strategy that uses all three. That is why we harp on all of you every month to review the latest edition of the Unfair Advantage Book on Winning the SE Wars to ensure your site is consistently SEO-optimized.

Next, we work repeatedly to communicate how important a blog and social media is for the average site to remain competitive online. Understanding