SEM Strategy: Combine SEO & PPC Data for More Powerful Results

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Jan 20

Written By Mauro Berno

SEM Strategy: Combine SEO & PPC Data for More Powerful Results

Organisations often have separate organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) strategies run by different teams or agencies, but the holistic term Search Engine Marketing (SEM) exists for a reason.

With good content and careful management paid and organic tactics can individually achieve great results. But the two working together can be a game changer, delivering more than the sum of its parts. Here’s why.

Learn quickly

If your website is new, or your organisation is just starting to invest in SEO, it’s going to take time to get things up and running. Keyword research through tools such as Google Ads and Google Trends will give you lots of ideas - but will they actually work for your brand, service or product?

PPC gives you the opportunity to try keywords quickly and succeed or fail fast. Find out which ones drive the greatest level and highest quality traffic, then pass that knowledge along to your SEOs. They’ll have a head start on the longer term game of optimising for organic traffic.

Refine your message

The same applies to sharing learnings from paid and organic copy.

PPC allows you to test the effectiveness of copy quickly through your ads, measuring which perform best against your goals. This insight can be used to help craft the page copy and meta information, making it more engaging and influencing the information shown on results pages.

With SEO, you may have a page driving fantastic engagement and goal conversion organically. You could boost your campaign further by using this information to create highly engaging PPC ads to compliment it.

Choose deliberately

Now this one can divide the crowd - if you’re in the top spot on the search engine results page organically, do you want to spend your PPC budget on those terms you’re already so well ranked for? My answer is maybe, but PPC and SEO alignment means you can choose, deliberately.

You can argue that ads appear above the organic results on search engine results pages and that including brand terms in your PPC campaign increases your quality score overall, etc. But if money is an object, you’d be better off spending your budget going after those keywords you’re not ranking on page one for at all.

If your budget is more plentiful, or a goal is really important to your business, alignment means you can choose deliberately where you want to use PPC and SEO together to get the greatest level of visibility on the results page.

You’re only going to be able to do this if the two strategies are working seamlessly together or are planned as one overarching SEM strategy and you have good processes in place to make them work together.

Make your negative keyword list more robust

Long tail keyword research is the bread and butter for SEO teams. Through this process they’ll discover keywords that might really work and those that definitely won’t.

This information can be extremely useful for building out your PPC negative keyword lists, saving you money and improving your quality score.

Not only that, there’s all sorts of potential marginal gains. For example keywords you’re bidding on which have little or no advertising competition. In that case the smart move is to have a great organic page and save your PPC budget for other terms.

Limit the impact if something unexpected happens

If you’ve got a clear process and good monitoring in place for your keywords, it will allow you to be more agile if something goes wrong or changes.

If one of your top keywords bombs due to an algorithm change or a new competitor comes into the market, you can get it covered quickly with PPC, while your SEO team works on recovering the situation. That means you’re never invisible to the market.