How to Use Paid Search and Organic Search All Together
One of the smartest ways to both streamline and coordinate the search marketing strategy.
I’ve been asked a lot of times by companies I work with, which part of search marketing should be their main priority: paid search or organic search? So, I thought of writing this article to explain why both of them are essential for any business and how we should use them together.
Paid advertising and SEO are both very important components of your search marketing strategy and you shouldn’t prioritize one over another. Instead, have your PPC and SEO teams working together to maximize ranking, conversions, and ROI.
A 2012 study by Google shows that half of the top-ranking site visits wouldn’t be possible without paid advertising. Of course, this data might differ depending on your company industry and approach. So, we shouldn’t make suppositions, but test different strategies and find out what works best for us.
People often think that paid search is only needed to boost your exposure until SEO campaigns start having results. SEO may indeed take some time to bring visits to your website, and using Google Ads can help you get some traffic in the meantime, but this is not the only reason you should use Paid Channels.
Let’s say you managed to get your website to show first in the SERP’s. Of course, this is a very important achievement, and it will help your business a lot, but what about the traffic you are losing because your competitors are using paid advertising?
Paid Ads appear above organic results, and on mobile, you can’t even see them without scrolling. Wouldn’t it be better to be first on both paid search and organic search?
Best Practices in Integrating Paid Search and SEO
In the next few lines, we’ll discuss the best way in which you can take advantage of both search marketing methods and how your SEO Specialist can work with your Paid Advertising Specialist to improve your website traffic and also conversions.
- Test keywords with paid ads first
Because SEO efforts might take a while before seeing results, test your keywords with paid ads first to make an idea about what keywords perform better for your chosen goals. Use these keywords when optimizing your website. These reports can be analyzed in Google Analytics by navigating to Acquisition->Campaigns->Paid Keywords.
2. Use highly converting keywords for paid search campaigns
If you already have a successful SEO strategy that was implemented about 6 months ago, you can use that info to enhance your paid search as well. You can see which keywords bring the highest conversion rate and use them in your paid search campaigns. These reports can be analyzed in Google Analytics by navigating to Acquisition->Search Console->Queries.
Learn more about how to use Search Console Reports and how to read them from the Google Support page.
3. Use ads copy for your meta description
Ads that have a good click-through rate can be used in your meta description. Don’t miss this opportunity to increase your website traffic. Use best performing ads to improve your organic traffic as well. Even if you have a good service or product, it means nothing if you don’t know how to sell it.
4. Create better landing pages for low quality score keywords
In Google Ads, you can see a quality score for every keyword. Besides Ad relevance and Expected CTR, you also can see the landing page experience. Use this report to improve your landing pages for every keyword that needs it. You can see more details about how to check your quality score on Google Support page.
The landing page is a very important part of both organic and paid search. Learn how to combine website design and website optimization to improve user experience, increase conversions, and time-on-page.
5. Use paid search for keywords that don’t list your website on SERPs
Let’s say you want to appear in search results for keywords that you don’t rank for yet. Until you see results from your SEO campaigns for that certain keywords, you can take advantage of paid ads to do that. You can lose traffic or clients to your competitors if you don’t take immediate action.
6. Move high-cost keywords from PPC to organic search.
When using PPC campaigns, you can analyze which keywords have the highest cost per click, and which ones have low conversions. If you have a limited budget, you can move keywords with high-cost and a high volume of traffic to organic search. The same thing applies to keywords that don’t have a high conversion rate, but they are still important to your business.
7. Retarget website visitors with remarketing campaigns
According to Marketing Sherpa, the overall average conversion rate for organic traffic that turns into leads should be 16%. Of course, this percentage can differ depending on your industry, landing page experience, and also your website’s presence on search results.
Because most of the users that are visiting a website for the first time are more interested in doing some research than buying, you need to remind them about your business. You can easily do that by using PPC retargeting campaigns.
Google Analytics offers you the possibility to define custom audiences for all website visitors, specific pages, goals, etc. You can import all of these audiences in Google Ads and use them to retarget previous website visitors.
Paid Search and SEO shouldn’t be separate departments.
Most of the companies are seeing PPC and SEO as different departments. That is not a good approach for marketing professionals. In the end, both teams fight for the same final goal. So take advantage of both channels and bring your teams together to create better, improved campaigns.
Thanks for reading.
Don’t forget to click the follow button if you would like to read more stories like this!
If you have any questions or any topics you want me to write about in the future, leave a comment below.
