SEO & PPC: Better Together

by Ascedia - May 3, 2017 - 3 minute read

Digital Marketing Digital Advertising & Paid Search

I recently had the pleasure of attending HEROConf 2017, a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) conference that covers a variety of topics related to digital paid media. There was a fantastic group of speakers covering local PPC advertising strategies, optimizing for mobile, tracking attribution, dynamic search ads, Excel hacks for PPC and much more. We also got a glimpse behind the scenes of the big players through representatives from Google, Bing and Facebook. This focus on one specific piece of the digital advertising industry helped us dig in deeper to address issues in more detail.

One of the most interesting and energetic presentations was given by Will Reynolds of SEER Interactive. He specializes in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and shared how SEO and PPC can work together for better results. His whole approach was summed up by his last slide: “EMPATHIZE THEN OPTIMIZE.” So many PPC advertisers are focused on getting ad clicks and putting visitors into their sales funnel that they forget about what the user really needs. Here are some tips I took away from his presentation.

How Are People Really Searching for Your Targeted Terms?

Discover the kinds of answers and information people are seeking in relation to your keywords. Address questions directly in your landing pages and ad copy. Find the sentiment behind the keywords to better understand the people behind the searches. A few tips:

Extend your keyword research to include looking at the predictive drop down.

If you see a Wikipedia answer near the top of the organic results, it means people are just trying to understand a term. Include some of that basic information on your landing page.
Pull People Also Ask (PAA) questions and answers and analyze these for content opportunities.
Run user tests to watch how people search for your targeted terms and how they interact with the results.

How Are People Talking About Your Product, Company or Related Terms?

Get a better understanding of the keywords people use when they talk about your product, your company or close competitors. You can also uncover issues people have with your products or weaknesses in competitor products.

Visit places like Quora, Reddit, Slideshare, Yelp, Medium, industry forums and anywhere else your product is discussed. Review the way users refer to your (or your competitor’s) products, including the terminology they use and any issues, concerns and complaints. Use this to inform your ad copy and landing page copy.

How Is Organic Search Answering These Queries?

If you don’t address user questions or concerns in your PPC ads, organic will do it for you and you’ll lose potential customers. A few tips:

Consider rich snippet hijacking - Look for the types of rich snippet answers that appear for your targeted queries and try to address those concerns in your ad copy and landing pages.
Look at top ranking organic results and how they address the query with metadata and landing page content.

Optimize Your Landing Page for User Experience, Not Just Conversions

Give users the information they are actually seeking before you try to make them convert. For example:

Use different landing pages to address various keywords themes more specifically.
Use the themes discovered in Google’s predictive drop down to dictate the content on your landing pages.
If your site has a calculator of some sort, use the input from these forms to better define your PPC audiences. Then, remove the audiences you don’t want and bid higher on the ones that you do want.

Improve Your Organic Efforts With Data From Your PPC Campaigns

Improve your organic clickthrough rate (CTR) without having to increase ranking. How?

Use results from your A/B testing in PPC ad copy to inform your page metadata. Use the ad copy wording that has been successful (high CTR) in PPC campaigns within the page title tags and meta descriptions.