Introduction: An Overview of SEO and PPC
Both SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) are great avenues to drive traffic to websites.
It may be slower going, but SEO has always been a trusted method to get your website in front of the right people. And that relies on you proving to search engines that your website has something people are searching for. However, SEO can take time to gain momentum. As it can take anywhere from a few weeks, to a couple of years to see your investment pay off. While PPC can propel your web pages to the top of search results much faster, since you’re paying for a premium spot..
It’s easy to think of these as opposing advertising methods. On the one hand, you have rankings you earned yourself. But on the other hand, you’re paying money to steal the spotlight.
I would like to argue that, in fact, SEO and PPC can harmonise and inform one another. Using both together can grant you a better ROI on your efforts, than doing one or the other alone. To go a step further, neglecting to implement SEO on a web page will impact its visibility on sponsored Google Ads results! You can see this for yourself by looking at Google’s own support documentation about Ad Rank.
What this means for you is that if you’re thinking of bypassing SEO by only focusing on Google Ads, hear me out!
How Google Ads Work
While Google Search results rely on Google’s robots crawling and finding your web pages, Google Ads allow you to control titles and descriptions, and which pages people are sent to. That said, ads these days are gradually relying more and more on AI and machine learning. What that means for you is that the ad platform needs good quality inputs in order to decide what to say in your ads.
Hence, the need for SEO and quality content!
What do SEO and PPC Have in Common?
Some people with digital marketing knowledge don’t know this: Google uses the same criteria to put websites in the paid and unpaid search results. The only difference is the paying part. You pay to get a premium spot in the top or bottom of the first page (SERP). Other than that, it’s Google’s aim to provide content that is beneficial to the user’s search query.
In other words, paying for any old keyword to send traffic to any old landing page does not let you bypass the need for optimised content! Yes, even though Google is quite happy to take your money, the company still has a responsibility to deliver useful information. Nobody’s going to be happy if the entire first page of a search result is covered with irrelevant ads!
Furthermore, as previously mentioned, Google Ads may use AI to determine what your description on the SERP should look like. If your page isn’t well written (or worse yet, doesn’t say anything), your description and click-worthy-ness may suffer as a result.
A Word About Keywords
When it comes to optimising a Google Ads account, one thing I’ll often do is use organic and paid keywords to inform one another.
In terms of looking at organic keywords to support Google Ads, this means looking into Google Search Console for inspiration. There may be keywords the website is organically ranking for, that we hadn’t considered using in paid search.
Another optimisation clue is in the keywords we’re bidding on; Are any performing particularly poorly? If we’ve done everything we can in terms of bid strategy and CTR, the next place to look is our landing page. As previously mentioned, Google needs to make sure that the links that appear in search results are relevant to what someone is searching for. If you haven’t fully optimised your page for organic SEO, Google will have limited understanding of what your page is about.
Conclusion
To sum up, hopefully you’ll understand now how PPC and SEO are related. Data from one can be used to inform the other, and ignoring your SEO can actually be harmful to your Google Ads results.
As digital marketers, we get that it’s important to stay on the cutting edge of changes in technology. However, it pays to be a bit “T shaped” in terms of gaining knowledge in topics adjacent to your field of expertise.
