SEO & Google AdWords: The Dynamic Duo for Bigger & Better Results
“The time has come for SEO & PPC teams to come out of the silos & join hands.”
Online market is always pulsating with the possibility of a carefully crafted digital strategy bound to fail, leaving you baffled. Surely businesses of all sizes are up for the challenge especially those actively competing on the digital frontier. There’s always a need to formulate a strategy that meets customer needs as well as comply with the search engine standards.
While most of us may consider SEO and AdWords being different, their purpose is the same: to boost ranking and visibility. But only few realise the potential of both strategies when implemented together, bringing tremendous results in terms of profit, new customers, better ranking and visibility. When combined, both SEO and PPC takes on a holistic approach to web design dubai of which the core components are:
On-Page Optimisation – Including content keywords and metadata let search engines to probe a website, check its relevancy and compliance.
External Links – Backlinks generated from various credible sources that lands to your website adds relevancy and improves authority on the search engine.
PPC/Google AdWords – Digital agencies using this strategy invest on different platforms that includes Google AdWords, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram; all redirect traffic to the respective website’s landing pages.
Let’s have a look at what SEO and Google AdWords can do for your digital strategy when combined!
- Visibility
One of the most obvious benefits is all the additional exposure on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Your potential client(s) would be tempted by the best of the best search terms to reduce PPC efforts however, the top two and three results on almost all of SERPs are PPC advertisements. By dominating both paid search and organic results would considerably boost traffic and leave an impression of enduring market presence.
- Keyword Data Allocation & Testing
Merging PPC and SEO campaigns means you’ve twice as much data to sift through, analyse and further research to power up the digital marketing strategy. PPC ads are quite resourceful when placing keywords in the organic strategy. You can also configure announcements to test overall performance and conversion. This’ll help in filtering particular words and sentences to your next SEO campaign’s context.
- Compare Best Performing PPC Ad Copies Against Organic Content Strategy
While testing the PPC-based keywords, it’s worth seeing which of the ads are performing well and lead to maximum conversions. You can then come up with creative & unique title tags, meta descriptions as well as content, see which holds to PPC and achieve likewise clicks with successful organic listings. Looking at their immediate results, the test elements are quite effective with PPC.
- Remarketing Campaigns to Reach Former Users
Let’s consider a case where a particular website’s already ranking fair enough courtesy of carefully implemented SEO efforts as well as drawing considerable visitors. But these are usually buyers or potential leads who take time in deciding.
Remarketing; kind of a combined SEO and PPC strategy can surely bring visitors back to the website, complete the purchase and/or convert sometime later. This way, you can reach out to former visitors, encourage them in returning to complete the purchase or convert into a lead. It’s possible of the customers to completely forget about you unless a remarketing strategy has been deployed.
- PPC to Test New SEO Keywords
Indeed, SEO is a long-term process, takes time, research and expense to bring out the desired result. You may be considering to target a particular keyword to the best of the SEO efforts but unsure if it’ll pay off.
Testing credibility or viability of a SEO keyword can be done best with PPC. All you need to do is pick a keyword that has the potential to rank higher and convert better, purchase the Google AdWords package for it. Keep tracking the results for sometime and observe the website's performance.
In case the outcome is favourable, you might as well begin optimising the website for it too. Should the campaign backfires, simply avoid SEO for the keyword as well.
- More Data for Smart Decision
Adding to all the benefits is all the huge data source you’ve at your end to help in taking smarter and informed decisions. You can also analyse similar metrics for both SEO and Google AdWords campaigns that include clickthrough rate, total time on the website, conversion rate & bounce-and-exit rates.
This’ll help you determine keywords with the highest sales potential, those which are actively redirecting traffic to your website as well as filter those that hold back users from making a purchase or lead conversion. Although you can get separate data from PPC and SEO, combining both would only give you more details to make a clear and smarter decision.
Here’s more on how Google AdWords can boost SEO results!
- The Click-Through Rates (CTRs)
Total percentage of users who’ve clicked the ad determines click-through rate and perhaps a reliable metric to consider. In general, a higher CTR indicates a clear, concise, organised and well-written ad that convinces readers to convert. By rendering higher CTRs from the PPC account to the organic search pieces can surely pay huge dividends because, gradual rise in the organic search CTR would revert more traffic from the rankings, improve them further and create a flywheel effect thereby resulting in even more traffic.
If you’re wondering why, know that CTR is a primary factor closely looked at by “RankBrain”; Google’s machine-learning algorithm which determines the worth of a website for better ranking. However, be vigilant enough not to optimise CTR at the cost of stay time and bounce rate because both of these are RankBrain factors as well. In-short, avoid overpromising and under delivering that results in a negative image.
The best strategy here is to have more or less 2+ ads running against each of the ad groups to split the test runs and extract the highest winning headlines. The data can further identify benefits and selection of words to which the audience responds most. You can then work these into the organic page headlines and wording.
Carefully swim deep into the AdWords account and determine patterns, trends or any other common denominators against high-ranking keywords and CTR ads. Just in case you’re unable to find any actionable insights, conduct testing to get some.
- Geographic Performance
Local SEO, one of the many categories of SEO helps in targeting people near any particular business locations. As the number of smartphone and tablet users rises all across the globe, so does the trend of finding local services and information.
Another research concluded that more or less 20% of all the local SEO search results in same-day sales. Even if there aren’t any physical locations to link with the local SEO, using geographic data from AdWords can surely augment a nationwide, regional or even international SEO campaign.
That said, you might want to look at conversions (revenue) to know the areas driving most of the sales and signups; clicks, impressions and CTR to know if a particular geographic location is more inclined to clicking the ads.
You can then use Google Trends to learn about the type of search terms used about product or industry against these locations as well as determine if the competitiveness of the terms for future. The information can be used to improve on-page SEO as well as refining of the target keywords.
- Display Network
One thing’s for sure when it comes to SEO, backlinks are a powerful factor for offsite strategies. URLs appearing on top of the first page have more or less 200 referring domains that direct backlink at them however, to build such a number of links to each page is a certain challenge.
This is where Google Display Network data comes to the rescue. If you’re running the display ads, the data can be used to explore authoritative and excellent link-building opportunities to improve the rankings.
Go to the Placements report, click “Where Ads Showed” in the report’s tab at the tip to see a list of websites where your ads have been displayed alongside the performance.
- Let it be Easier for the SEO Pitch
Since SEO is a long-term process, it takes time to get the desired result, convincing the already sceptical business owners is difficult. If you’re struggling to raise the bar of your project’s new SEO campaign or even validate the cost of all the work that you’re doing, AdWords is a quick answer.
Take for instance a business that’s already spending $30,000 a month on AdWords, the cost can be saved potentially in future once SEO results come into full swing. Always base the projections on the value of revenue that the AdWords drive.
If you simply breakdown the total cost or outcome of the existing PPC campaigns, it’ll highlight priorities and augment those with organic search.
Wrap It Up
On combining SEO and Google AdWords, it helps in combating negative PR, develops credibility and long-lasting presence on the digital front. Almost all creative digital agencies deploy both strategies to power up their marketing campaigns.