TL;DR: Improving your website’s content and technical details, something SEO experts are very good at, can help your PPC campaigns by:
- Lowering costs by improving your ads’ Quality Scores;
- Improving the performance of any AI-generated ads, like Dynamic Search Ads or AI Max-enabled campaigns.
Using organic search query data from Google Search Console can help your PPC team optimize their campaigns with:
- Keyword discovery;
- Developing Bid Strategies.
All of which can translate into lower costs and higher return on ad spend for your paid search program.
Whether you manage it yourself or have an agency manage it for you, most people treat PPC and SEO – or Paid Search and Organic Search – as two totally separate channels. And in many ways they are! But they have more influence on each other than you might think.
In today’s first part of a two-part series, I’ll be talking about how an SEO strategy for your site can help improve results for your PPC campaigns.
Lower Cost per Click Through Quality Score Improvements
Are you struggling with your ads consistently showing lower or having high cost per click (CPC)? One way to help your ads rank higher and cost less is by improving your ads’ Quality Scores.
Google Ads Quality Scores are a three-part score that Google uses to determine how relevant, useful, and engaging your ads and landing page experiences are for users. Quality Score is broken down into three categories: Expected clickthrough rate, ad copy relevance, and landing page experience.
The landing page experience part of the Quality Score is based on many of the techniques and standards that Google uses to determine which search queries pages should rank organically for, as well. These are things like “how well does the content on the landing page match the search keyword and the ad copy,” and “does your site load smoothly and quickly for users who click through.” These are exactly the kind of things that SEO professionals are trained to work with.
Matching Landing Page to Keyword & Ad Copy
Likely, the page that you are trying to drive paid traffic to is one that SEO would like to drive organic traffic to as well. When you bring in an SEO team and share what keywords you are using to bid on the page, they can step in and optimize the content for those keywords.
This will improve the “landing page experience” part of the Quality Score metric, bring your CPCs down, and allow you to get more bang for your buck when bidding.
Landing Page Speed
Another component of the “landing page experience” portion of Quality Score is how your website renders on mobile, including how fast it renders. These metrics are important to organic search as well, so an SEO team will already be looking for them, and SEOs are used to communicating with the web development team to fix them.
Having a dedicated SEO team to identify and push for these updates takes the pressure off of the PPC team and allows you to get back to optimizing things inside the account.
Improving Performance of Dynamic Search Ads, PMax, and AI Max for Search Campaigns
Google can serve ads to queries you’ve never thought of that it considers relevant, and it can also write ad headlines and descriptions based on how your site content matches users’ queries.
Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) are the oldest type of PPC campaigns that do this. While closely related to Search Campaigns, instead of using a specific set of keywords or a set landing page, you can give Google Ads some ad copy and a set of your website pages to use as potential landing pages, and Google determines what search queries and what final landing pages match content on your site. (Rumors abound that DSAs will sunset by the end of the year in favor of Performance Max or AI Max for Search campaigns.)
Performance Max, or PMax campaigns, a newer type of campaign, doesn’t use specified keywords either. Google uses its vast set of algorithmic signals to determine what queries to show your ads for. And if you have the “Final URL Expansion” option turned on, it crawls your site and picks which pages to use as final landing pages to match with which queries. While this is very similar to Dynamic Search Ads, Performance Max takes this a step further with more types of ad copy to serve, and more algorithmic signals to determine where and what shows.
AI Max for Search isn’t a campaign type, but a set of AI-powered tools and features that Google recently started offering to help optimize your Search campaigns. AI Max for Search’s Search Term Matching expands your broad match keywords with the same “keywordless” technology as PMax campaigns. AI Max Asset Optimization includes both Final URL Expansion, much like PMax, but also Ad Text Customization, rewriting your ad headlines and descriptions based on the content of the landing page.
All of these campaign types and campaign settings work better when Google can accurately determine what your site content is about and what it’s related to. Given that SEO is all about making sure that Google can find, parse, and understand your website content in order for it to rank well on Google Search, optimizing your site for SEO will help Google to better understand your website content for PPC as well.
(Watch this space for more detailed information from JumpFly about taking advantage of these ad types.)
Combined Keyword Strategy
One of the most powerful aspects of having SEO and PPC work together is by mapping out combined organic/paid performance.
One source of data that SEO teams use regularly that PPC teams might not have access to is called Google Search Console (GSC). Google Search Console provides data on the search queries and landing pages that your website is ranking for organically. These reports can be used for a few different things.
Keyword Discovery
Much like the search query reports in Google Ads, GSC provides search query reports that list which keywords your site is ranking for organically. Link your Google Ads and GSC accounts to view organic search data directly in certain Google Ads reports. That way, you can see if there are any organic keywords that are not being covered by PPC ads yet. This can be especially useful for identifying long-tail keywords.
Bidding Strategy
Matching up GSC search query reports with data from Google Ads lets you see which keywords are performing well in organic search, paid search, or both. This can help you make joint decisions about which keywords to bid on and how hard to push them.
The exact decisions you make with your teams will depend on your business, the competitive landscape, and what the keyword overlap looks like, but some example strategies that you could implement include:
- Pulling back on expensive PPC keywords that you rank well organically for (not recommended for verticals that have a strong competitive landscape).
- Bidding more aggressively on keywords that organically rank just off of the first results page (positions 7-15). You know your site is already relevant for those keywords, because they do rank fairly well, so they’re more likely to perform well within Google Ads.
In conclusion, the type of research that SEO professionals do complements and enhances the research your PPC team is doing to optimize campaigns. In addition, having richer, more focused content on your website helps give Google better context for the types of queries that people might use to find your content, allowing algorithmically- and AI-enhanced campaigns to make better ads and query selections.
But the efficiencies don’t only go one way! Stay tuned for part two, where we discuss how the campaigns you’re running for PPC can help your SEO efforts.
