How To Leverage PPC Data For Your SEO Campaigns

It’s no surprise that PPC campaigns are great for driving quick results. However, it’s not the only way paid campaigns can bring profit to digital marketers. Integrating your PPC data in your SEO strategy will help you improve your overall performance.

When it comes to digital marketing, pay per click (PPC) advertising or search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimisation (SEO) are arguably the two sides of the same coin. However, all too often companies will focus on one at the expense of the other.

Knowing how to use SEO and PPC together is a critical step in expanding your digital strategy to nurture top-of-funnel leads to the bottom-of-the-funnel. SEO helps widen the top of your funnel as it drives traffic on many terms and many topics while paid can be used to drive bottom-of-funnel conversions. SEM is a great channel to generate bottom funnel leads that are more likely to convert through targeted keyword bids. This can include targeting users that have previously clicked on your ads via retargeting.

How PPC helps your SEO

There are four major reasons you should make your PPC campaigns work together with SEO efforts

1. Analyzing your PPC campaigns, you can identify which keywords result in conversions the most. This step will let you focus on the web pages that generate the highest revenue.
2. Paid advertising is the best way to attract your target audience. The fact people click through the highly relevant ad and find what they're looking for on your website result in better user behavior metrics. As these visits will result in lower bounce rates and longer session durations, they'll serve as positive signals for search robots. That's why paid targeted traffic often has a positive impact on organic search rankings.
3. If your website is showing up both in paid and organic searches, the chances a user will click through one of the results increase. Moreover, most of the search results provide lots of special elements, including ads, featured snippets , “People also ask” box and others. If all of these elements are displayed on one page, it's not likely someone will scroll down to your page ranking the third in organic search.
4. Some brands bid on their competitors' branded keywords . In the result, the official website is shifting in search results. If you don't want to lose your prospects to competition, it's worth bidding on your branded keywords as well.

How to Make PPC and SEO Work Together

While the benefits of SEO and PPC collaboration are clear, the practical application of the effort still requires some clarification. Here are some of the best ways to leverage the data obtained from both paid and organic search for success:

Leverage PPC Keywords Data for SEO

Digital marketers have been using Google Ads' Keyword Planner data for years as their must-have research tool. However, the last several years have seen Google limit Keyword Planner data for those who are not active advertisers.

This change was unwelcome news for SEOs who had been using the tool to power their keyword research efforts and to build effective content marketing strategies With Google Keyword Planner suddenly off the table, some marketers were forced to seek out alternative keyword research tools.

However, those that do actively advertise through Google still have access to tons of valuable keyword data to inform PPC efforts. Most importantly, PPC teams can see which keywords convert searchers to customers By sharing this critical information with SEO teams, companies can amplify efforts targeting user intent by optimizing product, landing and other vital pages for terms that drive sales and meet user's needs.

Moreover, the keyword data supplied by PPC teams can be utilized to create content that targets prospects at different points in the buyer's journey, thereby helping to elevate a brand in the SERPs.

Leverage SEO Data to Reduce PPC Spend

On the flip side of the equation, SEO teams also possess data that can be extremely useful for paid search campaigns.

The fact is that PPC advertising is sometimes an expensive endeavor. Thankfully, Google Ads industry benchmarks show that the average eCommerce cost-per-click in search is $3.16. However, some terms are far more costly. Moreover, industries such as legal services reach an average of $56.75 per click.

Yet, no matter which industry we look at, getting the most bang for one's buck is crucial. By handing SEO data to PPC teams, this goal can be realized in a variety of ways, including:

• Pause Expensive Keywords: For those with a tight budget, it might be a good idea to focus on ranking organically for the more expensive keywords. SEO and PPC teams can coordinate to figure out which keywords should be paused and handed over to the SEO side of operations to target those words through optimization. In fact, this is likely to prove quite valuable as winning more expensive terms with SEO will not only help save a PPC team's budget, but it will drive extremely valuable traffic for much longer than any paid campaign could.
• Look For High-Performing Long Tail Keywords: Sellers can also use SEO data to identify any high-performing long-tail keywords and employ them within PPC efforts to enhance performance and reduce costs. Long-tail keywords tend to be more affordable than generic keywords, so this will naturally lower one's advertising budget.
• Better Geo-targeting: An SEO team might notice that a significant amount of organic search traffic is coming from a specific geographic location. Sharing this knowledge with the PPC team allows them to adjust bids to more effectively target this audience.
• Increased Overall Sales: SEO and PPC teams can also collaborate to boost sales potential, as well. If retailers have a product that is ranking well organically, PPC ads offering discounts can be deployed to appear alongside organic search listings, thereby increasing visibility in the SERPs and boosting overall traffic.
• Better Quality Score: A campaign's quality score impacts the cost-per-click of keywords and the position of ads in search rankings. Since SEOs are in control of landing page optimization for organic search, they can help PPC efforts by optimizing for quality scores as well by aiming for complete congruence between the ad and the destination, as well as the terms utilized for each.

Determine Where and How to Use Various Keywords

Determining which teams target which keywords is vital for enhancing both PPC performance and SEO outcomes. When both teams have access to a shared pool of data, the feasibility of meeting loftier search marketing goals becomes a real possibility.

For instance, by analyzing the totality of keywords a business is targeting through PPC and SEO, teams can pinpoint the areas of overlap where specific terms are winning in both the SEO and PPC arenas. Similarly, teams can uncover which keywords are the most difficult for their respective units, thereby allowing them to see if the other side could better support those terms.

Possessing this information enables businesses to make the wisest possible decisions in terms of how an ad budget is spent and how SEO teams optimize on-page content by identifying these keywords, the teams can work in concert to establish which queries both channels should focus on versus those that only one of the groups should address.

For example, by analyzing the individual and combined click-through rates for phrases that both SEO and PPC and ranking on the first page for, the teams can determine if it is worth spending the money advertising for that specific search, or if it is best left to earn clicks organically.

Craft Ads that Match Content

PPC professionals work hard to craft ads that capture the attention of consumers and generate clicks.

But what happens after the click? Will they convert or bounce?

Of course, to maximize the effectiveness of PPC ads, it is necessary to ensure that traffic converts in the post-click experience. However, a common problem is that PPC teams create ads and have nothing to do with the post-click encounter. This disagreement is the result of the separation of the two groups.

By allowing SEO and PPC to work closely together, SEO teams can create landing pages that convert visitors into buyers , while the PPC crew crafts ad copy that closely matches the headlines of landing pages or the site's content, thereby enticing the visitor to act.

Moreover, tightly tying the landing page and ad copy together will help to improve quality scores.

An excellent tactic for accomplishing this is allowing the PPC team to leverage engaging title tags and meta descriptions developed by the SEO team as ad copy. These assets likely already include some potential keywords and help to ensure a close match between ads and their destinations.

Using PPC for Content Marketing

Content is incredibly valuable for SEO purposes. However, it can also play a considerable role in nudging the consumer along the sales funnel. While the goal of PPC is often to earn traffic and increase sales rapidly, those who are creating content to meet long-term goals can significantly benefit from PPC integration.

Instead of using PPC for its usual function, advertisers can deploy ads to promote content and build brand awareness. After all, the Google Ads data that advertisers have access to shows which products are most popular, which demographics are most interested, which keywords convert best and other powerful insights. With this knowledge, SEOs can build content that will be substantially more impactful than content created without such information.

Then, PPC teams can help to push the content up the SERPs by driving paid traffic from Facebook or Google to support a faster ramp-up for premier rankings. Even if users aren't clicking these ads, they are still becoming increasingly familiar with the brand, thereby breeding higher levels of trust as the company becomes more recognizable.

A Retargeting Strategy for SEO Traffic

Plainly put, topping the SERPs is incredibly challenging. Making matters worse, most first-time visitors won't convert. In fact, 92 percent of first-time visitors aren't even there to buy Talk about a gut punch.

That said, this sobering fact is precisely why having a retargeting strategy in place is so critical. After roping in a visitor with a supreme SEO program that earned ideal visibility, it's time to let PPC do the work by creating an effective retargeting campaign that will get them to follow through with the desired action.

However, to achieve optimal results, SEO and PPC need to communicate. Again, PPC has data on popular products, demographics, keywords and targeted information. SEO ensures product pages are built to increase conversions . By facilitating a synergistic atmosphere among the teams, the two will be far more likely to create a unique retargeting campaign that will gently nudge prospects through the buying process and convert them into paying customers.

Google is quite possibly the most competitive place on the internet. Therefore, SEO and PPC collaboration has evolved into a must for becoming a top contender.

Additionally, as Google continues to update its algorithms and implement seismic changes to both paid and organic search, the best way to weather the frequent storms and thrive under the new paradigm is to ensure that PPC and SEO teams are in close, constant communication. After all, communication failures are often the root cause of all sorts of breakdowns.

When SEO and PPC combine their powers, better results can be achieved across the board.

If your brand needs help in achieving the victories that can be won as a result of SEO & PPC integration, reach out to me for a free consultation , and we can discuss how to use each discipline to dominate the SERPs.