You might think that SEO and PPC are two different ways of digital marketing. In most firms, the SEO team or professionals and the PPC team work independently.
But recent experiments have shown this as a poor strategy. You should combine SEO and PPC keyword tactics to win visibility and finally increase your ROI. Let's learn how you can do that.
PPC focuses on landing pages and CTR rates, and it is more expensive in the long run but provides faster results. But you have to keep throwing pennies to keep running PPC ads.
While in SEO, you put the net in the waters (SEO content) and wait for the fish to get caught (your target audience).
With SEO, you can keep getting results after a long time without even promoting or sharing your content on different platforms. Don’t focus much on PPC and neglect SEO and vice versa, and you will lose the balance. The secret lies in balancing the two.
This article will shed light on PPC and SEO keyword strategies and how their mix can help you attain higher ROI.
How Can You Combine PPC and SEO Keyword Strategies to Boost Your Returns
Learn about the impact of SEO on your company’s other departments
Hold a meeting between your PPC and SEO experts and ask them to collaborate while creating a game plan for achieving mutual objectives.
They should learn from each other‘s experiences and specific industry skills and implement them in their work and strategies.
The magical mix of PPC and SEO keyword strategies to help your business win
Sometimes a certain keyword might be legitimately attributed to PPC, so if you use the same keyword in your blogs, your pages will compete against each other. And google will choose one of them to show, while the other’s ranking will take a dip.
Some may argue that you can repair the harm done by SEO and PPC working independently. Yes, you can, but it will take precious time and effort.
You can save the money and use it on your business's other objectives that you are neglecting.
When you combine your PPC and SEO keyword strategies intending to achieve one goal with these two different techniques, then magic happens that helps you boost your ROI.
You target your audience better and save money along the way. It is a win-win condition.
Find problems within your current SEO and PPC strategy
You want to improve your keyword strategies because you are not getting your desired ROI results which is why you are here.
Now, do you know what is wrong with your SEO and PPC keyword strategies? If not, then how can you move on? Don't worry as we will help you find the issues in your strategies.
You might have one or more or all of these issues mentioned below:
- You pay for PPC leads that you can get from SEO
- You are doubling up the outcomes of SEO and PPC but not getting multiplied impact of increasing traffic in correspondence
- You get fewer conversions if you don’t cater to the traffic coming from both strategies
- Your conversion rate for a specific keyword is higher for SEO or PPC
What is keyword overlapping?
Keyword overlapping or cannibalization means you target the same keywords or phrases with multiple of your site’s pages. Search engines usually rank only one or two links from the same website. Therefore, you end up ranking against your pages.
Keyword cannibalization happens in PPC when you use the exact targeted keywords in two or more ad campaigns on google ads or somewhere else.
Then your two PPC campaigns will compete against each other, and one’s ranking might drop because of the other (your page).
But, another type of cannibalization occurs when your PPC professionals and SEO experts both target the same keywords. It will mean that your business’s keyword strategies will compete against each other rather than with the competitors.
Define search terms for SEO
You should name different keywords or terms like a long tail, generic, secondary, etc. Do this with both broader search terms and shorter ones and make two categories of them.
Also Read: How to Increase Leads Count through SEO (2023)
How do you block keyword overlap in SEO and PPC?
Firstly, you should ask your PPC experts to list the PPC keywords that users click on but don't convert over a certain period (1 month, 2 months). Some SEO tools can help them in doing that.
Then your SEO professionals should pull out keyword data from the Google search console and sessions and conversions data from analytics on the landing pages.
Filter keywords
- Search your target queries on google and filter out the content that ranks in the top three positions.
- Test the new search terms
- Check Google Analytics about your landing page which ranks for a specific search term. Check its organic traffic, its increase and decrease, and the conversions.
Test your keywords
- Add the keywords you have pulled out to the negative keyword setting in google ads for an exact match.
- Run this campaign for one to two weeks.
Now we know how many target customers reached you through the ranking page, we can view the before, and after impacts of negative keywords, which we excluded from our ad campaigns.
Now compare:
Your landing page’s traffic to the PPC and SEO traffic separately for the test timeline against the previous timeframe. Also, compare the conversion rate for your landing page, once for SEO and then for PPC.
Finally, compare your revenue or objectives from both strategies.
Find these patterns:
- Increased ROAS or return on ad spend in your PPC campaign because the excluded keywords were supposed to be generating clicks but not conversions
- Improved organic traffic which should be the correct route if the cannibalization was indeed boosting PPC
- Increased conversions for either of the channels
The conversion rate may dip for some keywords of landing pages. The reason: your business is getting organic traffic but all of the prospects need to convert better since the PPC campaign was active. Rather leave Paid ads to work well alone or double up your SEO efforts.
Keep the negative keywords if all the above are fulfilled positively. It means higher SEO traffic, improved ROAS with diminishing expenses, boosted organic conversions, and the same or more gross conversions (PPC+SEO).
Potential Issues that might erupt
We know you still have some questions in your mind, after all, you manage clients’ SEO and PPC, and they will not react well to any loss of sales.
Create an action plan and get it approved by your client to handle problems if they pop up.
Suppose your SEO campaign gets even fewer conversions than the PPC one. Then, consider the search query and answer a few specific questions.
- Have you made any changes to the landing page in question?
- What can you take from the PPC ad to enhance user experience on the SEO page?
There is another advantage of the practice we mentioned above. You can capitalize on relevant and user-oriented content and key-value targeting of your PPC landing page to target an organic keyword and landing page.
Here is how:
- You focus the PPC landing page content on conversions more
- Google ad copy can facilitate meta descriptions
- Ad copy titles can aid the meta titles for click-through rate
- Paid search informs you about the more suitable landing page for the keyword at hand and you could stop the unsuitable page from ranking
- You should double up on specific days or times of the week, depending on what phase of the cycle you are in
The optimum outcomes poured from swapping the exact keywords that included the brand because these terms had competitive spending and reasonable conversion rates.
We get mixed outcomes with generic search terms. Still, you can win with a good SEO strategy used for a costly keyword.
Bottom Line
SEO and PPC are inseparable like two wheels of a vehicle. The car could not run with a punctured or battered wheel. For the car to run at its best, both wheels should function correctly.
Remove the myth from your mind that you can win at your company's digital marketing by only pouring dollars into one of them.
Focusing all or most of your efforts on either SEO or PPC is synonymous with putting all your eggs in one basket. You unlock the true potential of your search engine marketing strategy by diversifying the way you target searches by your target audience.
Maven Digital is a mobile app development company that builds digital solutions for aspiring businesses like yours. Our bespoke SEO services can help you multiply your conversions, sales, and revenue quickly. Get in touch today!
