In part two of this three-part series, here’s how running Paid Search (PPC) ads can help your brand, both by directly benefiting Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts, as well as doing some things that SEO can’t do.
Also, don’t miss part one of this series, “How SEO Will Help Your PPC.”
How PPC Can Directly Help Your SEO
More Performance Information
Unfortunately, Google has not allowed much, if any, organic query information to pass through from search results to on-site analytics, such as GA4 or Adobe Analytics. Google and Bing Webmaster Tools show impressions and clicks for specific queries, but because that doesn’t carry over into on-site analytics, it’s almost impossible to tell which specific search queries result in on-site engagement and conversions.
However, with PPC, Google allows much more query data to pass through to on-site analytics. (Yes, even with the changes in query visibility in the last 5 years.) In addition, PPC ad platforms have their own conversion tags that can gather conversion and revenue data independently of on-site analytics. This means that if paid search ads are running on queries that SEO is also tracking or optimizing towards, SEO professionals can use the conversion data from PPC query reports to estimate keyword value and focus their efforts on higher-performing keywords.
Messaging Testing
SEO metadata (titles and meta descriptions) is very similar to text-style PPC ads. Both PPC and SEO want better clickthrough rates on those titles and descriptions (or headlines and descriptions, for ads). However, SEO title tags and meta descriptions are only updated as often as the pages are recrawled, and many times Google will replace the title, the description, or both with something it deems more relevant — and it doesn’t even tell you when it does!
Testing to find the most click-worthy titles and descriptions is much easier with PPC ads. With Responsive Text Ads, you can add several variations of messages that you’d like to use in the title tag or the meta description for a page, and let the ad collect data for you as to which variations work better for which search queries.
More Query Discovery
Both SEO and PPC teams are always on the lookout for new, potentially relevant keywords to add to their efforts. From the SEO side, keyword discovery for keywords you’re not already ranking for might fall to third-party tools, using “topic clusters” or competitor gap analysis. As always with SEO queries and keywords, it can be hard to tell which queries will be worth going for without any data to show if they’ll convert.
PPC is great for keyword discovery, especially with broad match keywords, AI Max for Search settings, and Performance Max campaigns, which use Google’s algorithmic signals and matching to show ads on queries that are likely to get clicks.
Because paid search has more complete reporting (as mentioned above), potential new queries can be filtered by those that actually get clicks and conversions, which means they have a higher likelihood of producing worthwhile revenue if they are added to SEO keyword optimizations.
What PPC Does That SEO Can’t Do (Alone)
Own the SERP
For many keywords, even if your website ranks #1 organically, competitors have the chance to bid on and place ads that show above the top organic results. While studies show that users tend to favor organic results over ads, ads do still pick up some of that traffic.
Branded terms are a common place where a company might want to own or control the search engine results page (SERP), especially in very competitive niches. In my experience on both the SEO and PPC side of things, executives often want to reduce or eliminate PPC spend on branded keywords, assuming that everyone who clicks on a branded PPC ad will still click on an organic listing if no branded ads are present. However, every time I’ve done that experiment, there’s always a portion of traffic that does not get picked up by organic results and gets caught up in the other ads at the top of SERP instead.
Given that this is true for branded traffic, where users are looking for a specific brand and will often scroll until they find it, it can be doubly true for high-traffic, high-value non-branded keywords as well. Using both SEO and PPC to target extremely important keywords funnels as many of those high-value, high-intent users as possible to your website.
Sitelink Control & Promotional Messaging
As mentioned above in the “Messaging Testing” section, Google uses a website’s title tags and meta descriptions as suggestions at best. This is even worse with larger, expanded search listings that have sitelinks. Sitelinks for organic listings are chosen completely by Google, with no way for a business or website owner to suggest or request changes to those sitelinks. This can result in less-than-ideal or even completely irrelevant sitelinks.
However, with PPC ads, you can include the sitelinks that matter to you. While Google will still decide which or even if sitelinks show in your ads, at least you can exactly craft the text and only include the ones you want. If you are struggling with getting Google to choose the sitelinks you want in their rich results, setting up a PPC ad with exactly the sitelinks you want on it is going to be the best way to accomplish this.
PPC ads are also a good way to update frequently-changed sales and discount info. If your business or website runs discounts that get updated or changed very often, making sure the correct information is displayed often means that an updated title tag and meta description would take too long to influence the organic search results, putting you at risk of having incorrect information by the time Google recrawls your pages and decides if it will update your search listings. You can put a more evergreen, generic message in your title tags and meta descriptions, while switching out the language in your paid search ads so that the information is always fresh.
In conclusion, SEO teams can greatly benefit from access to PPC data for estimating the value of certain search queries, as well as for testing the clickthrough rate of different messaging. Additionally, running PPC campaigns in addition to SEO efforts can help control your search presence in a way that SEO alone cannot, with the ability to choose sitelinks, swap out messaging frequently, and dominate search results for especially important keywords.
Stay tuned next time for how best to set up your SEO and PPC strategy so that they can coordinate with each other and work together to really boost your website’s marketing.
