5 ways to get PPC and SEO working together

PPC is expensive. SEO is slow.

Unfortunately, they are often handled separately. Aligning these channels is one of the best ways to boost your online marketing performance.

By having them work together you will get incredible learnings and results - and maximize profit.

Here’s how.

PPC is one of SEO's most powerful tools - but often neglected

Why companies struggle to make actionable progress:

• SEO and PPC are handled by different players (teams/agencies)
• data is not shared
• websites are built for one of the two (hint: you can do both)

But there is hope. I will explain how you can overcome these problems.

Here’s how, step by step:

Step 1: Share keyword intelligence.

When an SEO team decides to pursue a certain keyword, it can take months before they see measurable results. In PPC however, you’ll know whether copy or a keyword is working in a matter of days.

You might consider using PPC to get short-term results and use those insights in your SEO strategy later. Since you can measure a lot of variations in your PPC campaign results you will generate a lot of insights quickly.

For example, your PPC campaigns will show data for:

• headlines, descriptions, title tags
• Keywords and topics
• New messaging

On top of that, also look at the results on your landing pages:

• bounce rates
• time spend on page
• A/B testing of your copy
• Goal completions

Use the insights you generated with your PPC campaigns to choose the best topics. Optimise headlines and content based on the expectations of your audience.

Step 2: Bring CRO to all pages.

Focusing on conversion optimisation is not just a job for the PPC department. SEO can be transaction-able as well.

The trick to building good PPC pages is to explain enough about your product or service, while always keeping the path to conversion clear.

SEO pages, however, require authoritative content to rank well. This content is often richer that the ones we build for PPC pages. Yet if there is no clear purpose or the path to conversion is buried beneath layers of content, all traffic will be lost.

Make sure your organic pages are just easy to navigate as the paid variants. Make sure your CTA’s are easy to spot and your visitors have an uninterrupted experience that leads to conversion.

Step 3: Avoid the PPC trap

We already established sharing keyword intelligence is a standard best practice. By knowing the intent behind each search query you can avoid keyword traps. Study the search results closely if you want to understand keyword intent.

For example, if you Google ‘ppc landing page’ you’ll find some interesting differences between the advertisers on the first page. There are 2 companies promoting landing page builder tools, and the other 2 are promoting marketing services. How can this be?

This means that the intent behind this keyword is not clear. It can be that people are looking for:

• what a ppc landing page is
• a tool to build landing pages
• a company to build landing pages for them
• landing pages examples
• marketing services

This keyword is so broad, that unless money is not an issue, you are better off staying clear of targeting this keyword. You will most likely reach a lot of people that are looking for something completely different.

SEO-focused marketers are constantly studying search intent, therefore collaboration between SEO and PPC is critical. Be hyper-focused on being as relevant as you can be, especially since you are paying-per-click.

Step 4: Analyse your domain structure

There are strategic elements to a well-designed SEO website that can interfere with your PPC strategy.

• PPC benefits greatly from A/B testing, while SEO doesn’t want duplicate content
• You don’t want to much navigation clutter on your PPC pages, while SEO benefits from that
• SEO redirects might get an ad disapproved

You can easily mitigate these challenges by using subdomains. A subdomain can still benefit your main domain, without having to compromise between SEO and PPC teams. You will also be able to use the same analytics property and branding as a bonus.

Step 5: Schedule in time to talk to each other

Stating the obvious, right? But in real life we often work in silo’s. Schedule 10-15 mins on a regular basis to collaborate and share findings.

This will ensure both parties will be prepared to enhance each other's work and tackle challenges on their way.

Also, this prevents the possibility of sending traffic to a broken link when the SEO team makes changes to the site without communicating it to the PPC team.

Optimising for both SEO and PPC can be challenge, but it can be done. Let me know your thoughts!