How Should PPC and SEO Work Together to Gain Visibility

How Should PPC And SEO Work Together To Gain Visibility

The aim is to get PPC and SEO work together effectively and it does not matter if you are managing just one of the channels or both of them. However, it is not as easy as it sounds. Sharing top-performing PPC ad copy by category and using this to update meta descriptions is a typical request that is cropping up.

  • 61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority. (Impactbnd)
  • The total number of devices around the world with ad blockers rose from 142 million to upwards of 615 million from 2018 to 2019. (Powertraffick)
  • 46% of Internet users can’t readily tell the difference between PPC ads and links returned organically from searches. (Ppcresellers)
  • Google Ads alone reaches a network of more than $2 million websites and applications. (Google)
  • Consumers make more than 160 billion searches per month on Google alone. (Statista)

PPC teams must share ad copy performance with their SEO counterparts and the impact here is nominal provided your meta descriptions are not awful. One of the first issues you might face is picking and prioritizing what you do when is vital.

Switching off PPC ads when you, organically, rank in position one is the second common request. It gets the attention of sharp CMOs and CFOs and makes perfect sense at the beginning.

But how do you get the right data in the right place to see if it’s truly working is the second crucial challenge to overcome. This is where getting the right data is key.

Keyword Universe

Keyword Universe is one of the effective ways to improve SEM data for your clients. It does not offer perfection but surely a working framework on which to form your reporting and optimize efforts. PPC search query data is used as a starting point.

Category column to categorize your terms, after that you can pivot up and then assign landing pages to categories. Have a good understanding of organic conversions and revenue. It might not be a perfect solution but it gives you something to work with.

You can use some tools, like Google Keyword Planner, to add in search volume estimates which will let you know what your paid, organic, and SEM share of voice is.

It will give you key ideas about many issues like where is PPC very dominant and SEO not that much dominant, what can be done to improve rankings across these terms and much more. You can gauge whether you want or need PPC coverage by adding in search queries where you only rank organically.

If you want to target some keywords, add them and let the PPC team run some tests to know the type of volume and competition you will be up against. The most time-consuming part of the process is the categorization element of the report.

Brand Testing

The proposition for switching off generics can be blurry and it is usually realized by the client that turning off a generic head term is possibly not going to have the expected impact.

There are lots of options and approaches here. In case you are also making changes to bidding, what you absolutely cannot do is to scrape Google search results. Turning off all the strategies that are discussed until now will cause a drop in traffic and a possible drop in orders and revenue.

You don’t have to protect your brand all the time. If you have some saved budget, you can use it somewhere else, for instance, you can use it to grow your brand with YouTube. If you aren’t bidding for your terms, you lose data. A

dopting a more balanced approach can take time but will be helpful in saving the budget. You can explain why the results are as they are if you keep the data flow going.  Let both your PPC and SEO teams feed into a report and make sure to fill that report every week.

Your overall PPC investment will decline, your SEM traffic will stay static and you can have a more balanced approach if you take these few key steps.

Build An Environment That Encourages Sharing

In addition to the more practical tips discussed so far, the most workable approach in getting PPC and SEO to work well together is formulating a way for the teams to talk to each other.

It is going to be easier if this is internal but it is likely to be a bit more difficult across different agencies. You can start a monthly learning deck which gives you a top-line view of performance versus targets for key metrics. You can have a monthly call as it works for most of the clients.

However, it can be changed depending on the scale of work that is going on. You should share anything that you find to be relevant. Don’t skip even the smallest detail because sometimes it can be important.

Remember the other teams, as well as audience data, is already a crucial pillar. The PPC teams have access to the extensive stuff at their fingertips. Therefore ensure that the social and programmatic teams know about it.

It might seem a bit like the attribution conversation to get PPC and SEO to work better together. Yes, it is not going to be perfect at all times but definitely is better than doing nothing.

 
 
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