Historically, SEO and paid aren’t usually channels that communicate with each other as they operate on very different timescales.
The organic (SEO) team will be creating recommendations and strategies that will influence the performance of the site a few months in the future. Whereas the paid team will be working on weekly, if not daily, strategies and targets.
However, just because these two different teams have different timelines, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t work closely together to drive the same results.
In fact, it’s the exact opposite!
With your paid team working on real-time and real user data, this can be a gold mine for your SEO which is usually limited by third-party tools & estimated data.
Let’s dive into a few ways in which this real-time and real user data can help drive optimisations from an organic perspective.
High revenue keywords not ranking on page one
One of the key benefits of running a paid campaign is that you’re able to see the exact phrase someone has typed into Google to find your ad. We can then track the journey of this user through to purchase (or conversion).
With this, we can figure out which phrases convert well and generate the most revenue.
Once you have collated this list of high value keywords, we can begin tracking our organic visibility to understand whether we rank well for these phrases.
If we do already rank well for these phrases, that’s great, no further action is needed.
However, if we’re not already ranking on page one, there’s some work to be done!
Look at the competition and figure out why they could be ranking higher than us. We already know that this is a valuable phrase for us so it should be very easy to get buy in for additional resource to help get our page ranking better.
High traffic keywords not ranking
In SEO, we do our keyword research using third-party tools that provide an estimate of how many people are searching for the relevant phrases we want to be found for.
However, with access to PPC keyword data, we can have much better insight into how many people are actually searching for these phrases.
For any keywords that generate a high number of clicks/impressions, we need to ensure that we have a good organic position and are well optimised to help supplement our paid activity.
If our paid channels are showing a huge amount of traffic to the site for specific keywords, this is a huge sign that our audience are searching for those phrases and that we should optimise for them above all else.
Are we currently ranking well for these phrases? If not, why not? Dive into the competition and see what opportunities are available to develop the organic visibility further.
Organically rank high-cost phrases to save budget
Pay per click is a fantastic way to immediately break onto page one of the search results for your target phrases. However, depending on the market the business is operating in, this can get rather expensive to maintain in the long term.
Whilst PPC should definitely form part of the marketing mix, we should use this channel to create data insights that can lead organic search activity.
There may be certain phrases that we want to be found for in the search results, either from a commercial or visibility perspective, that have a high cost per click value. Rather than continuously paying for this visibility, we should optimise our site to organically appear for these phrases reducing the need to bid on these phrases and freeing up this budget to focus on other areas.
To see these phrases, open your Google Ads account, go to Keywords and then the Search Terms report. Once on here, order your search terms on ‘Cost’ high to low to see which keywords you’re spending the most on.
This essentially provides you with a hit list of expensive phrases to optimise for.
Paid search and organic search are two channels that are essential for the growth of any site. They both have parts to play and offer very different insights. However, they should never work in isolation and by sharing those insights we can create a real powerhouse in the search results.
Whilst you don’t need to have both your paid and SEO teams under one roof, it does make it easier to open up the lines of communication to facilitate this collaboration between channels.
If you would like to hear how we can help with any of your digital marketing needs, get in touch today at team@modo25.com.
