Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) tend to be siloed from each other.
This leads to friction between teams, questions about attribution, and often self-sabotaging tactics to hinder scalable profits.
I love this question of seeking to build PPC empathy and collaborating on SEO initiatives. Barouyr of Yerevan, Armenia asked:
“If someone understands SEO and general marketing (customer personas, targeted marketing), and has a very basic understanding of PPC, where should he start to understand how to build a PPC campaign for his company?”
This post touches on the concept of SEO/PPC alignment that empowers each other and makes suggestions for further exploration.
Keyword Theory: Active Goals vs.passive target
keyword researchmanagement and strategy are part of SEO and PPC.
However, the associated tasks and criteria for choosing keywords are slightly different.
One of the biggest differences is that PPC needs to consider tight variants rather than perfect syntax.
You don’t need to bid on everything, as close variants get subtle changes in keywords and implied terms.
For example, bidding on the keyword phrase “balance dog trainer near me” will allow you to come up with the following terms for all match types:
- “The Dog Trainer for Aggressive Dogs”
- “[location] dog trainer”
- “Dog training near me”
In PPC, Advertisers care:
- auction price: Is this keyword the best cost-effective variation? Is my income enough to justify the cost?
- Competitiveness: Will everyone choose this variant?
- tolerance: Will this variant do the search I need?
- structure: Is this keyword suitable for my account structure or does it require major changes?
Incorporating these questions into your keyword research will help turn the job into paid work.
Deciding whether you’re actively targeting or allowing passive targeting via close variants will come down to cost, competitiveness, and search volume.
read more Keyword Theory is here.
Dynamic Search Ads: Benefit from a Well-Optimized Website
Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) are a staple of PPC – they rely on Google/Microsoft to crawl your site to provide ad headlines and optimal landing pages based on search terms.
You know you’re doing a good job of SEO on your website if the advertising algorithms can understand the content correctly.
If you’re having trouble finding the right categories, you may need to adjust your tags and site structure.
Leveraging DSA can be a good way to start PPC because:
- DSA campaigns/ad groups will teach you How prospects search.
- you will be able to Cover more parts of your business a budget.
- This SEO Investments Can Generate More Returns Performance through Dynamic Search Ads campaigns.
A DSA can be set up as a standalone campaign or added to an existing campaign.
It’s important to note that Google Ads allows mixed campaigns, while Microsoft doesn’t.
If you do end up importing Google campaigns into Microsoft, be sure to choose to separate DSA from campaigns.
you Learn more about Dynamic Search Ads here.
Conversion Tracking: Understand ROI from a single source of truth
Conversion tracking tells you which parts of your campaign are driving value and which are not.
Google Analytics Helps track conversions across disciplines.
As an SEO expert, you’re probably used to using Analytics goals and events.
Advertisers have a choice – they can use ad platform conversion tracking (which is a separate code) or import from Google Analytics.
In most cases, you will want to use Google Analytics because:
- Consistency of reporting and event valuation.
- No extra code required on the website.
- More advanced conversion events might need.
Using Google Analytics also helps with attribution.
Advertising platforms have been moving away from last click and specific conversions.
go through Leverage analytical attribution modelsyou can use the same source of truth for everyone and incorporate transformation modeling into all reports.
Landing Page Theory: Guide Users to Profit Without Breaking SEO
The hardest shift in strategic thinking will be login page.
In SEO, content has to be rich, and the navigation bar contributes to technical SEO gain.
In PPC, content only needs to focus on the most important insights, and there are very few opportunities for users to do anything other than convert actions.
One of the best ways to deal with this is to direct PPC traffic to subdomains.
This will allow you to comply with PPC engagement rules without affecting your SEO.
Cumulative Layout Offset (CLS) also affects PPC (and can negatively impact Quality Score), so it still needs to wait at least five (ideally eight or more) seconds on the page CRO for it to fire.
takeout
Most SEO strategies pave the way for PPC empathy, and you definitely don’t need to start over.
Note that ideally you want to separate the landing page experience and use a single source of truth for conversions and reporting.
Questions about PPC?by submitting this form Or tweet @navahf with the hashtag #AskPPC. See you next month!
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Featured image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Magazine
