If your organic and paid search campaigns aren’t talking to each other, you’re wasting a lot of work. Many of the insights you gain in one area can be applied to the other, and neglecting to share those insights will result in lost opportunities and duplicated efforts. Still, it happens all the time – either because different people focus on SEO and PPC within an organization, and they don’t communicate enough, or because marketers forget how much these two areas of search have in common.
So how can you change your thinking and your process so that PPC gains can lead to SEO gains and vice versa? Here are three ideas to get you started.
Use PPC Search Query Data for SEO
In analyzing your PPC search query data, you may find terms that are driving lots of paid search traffic, but don’t perform well in organic search. These are an obvious opportunity – your marketing team can create SEO content optimized for those same terms, increasing your traffic volume without increasing your PPC budget. The PPC data tells you that those keywords are relevant and conversion-friendly, so there’s no reason not to go after them with organic content.
Chad Summerhill recently wrote a detailed post explaining how to get the right data from your web analytics, prepare your data, and then analyze it so you can use those high-performance search queries in your SEO keyword list.
Base Your Campaign Structure on Your Information Architecture
Your site’s information architecture – the taxonomy that defines its organization – should be based on very similar principles as your AdWords campaign structure. In other words, both should have a natural, branching flow from high-level topics down to more specific subcategories. Those subcategories will represent ad groups and pages on your site, and the keywords should appear in your ad groups and ads as well as in the text on your pages.
If you’ve already put a lot of effort into a usable, crawlable site architecture, don’t reinvent the wheel when you create your PPC campaign – it can echo that same structure. This is also a great way to ensure that most of your site’s content has a corresponding ad group.
Use SEO Success Stories as PPC Landing Pages
Hopefully you’re tracking conversions for all your pages and keywords – not just those set up for PPC. If you find that certain pages you created to rank for organic keywords perform well conversion-wise, why not re-purpose those pages as PPC landing pages? For example, say you have a popular blog post called “How to Get Smoky Eyes” and 25% of visitors end up ordering an eye makeup brush. You could use that same post as a landing page for an ad based on the same keyword, with a description and offer like “Get hot smoky eyes in 3 easy steps. Save on brushes!”
Once you get in the habit of letting your SEO and PPC efforts inform each other, you’ll naturally think of more ways to repurpose content and data, and your traffic and rankings will reap the benefits!
Elisa Gabbert is the Content Development Manager at WordStream Inc., a provider of advanced pay-per-click software and free keyword research tools.
