How to Use Your PPC Campaigns as a Prospecting Tool for SEO

When launching a digital symbol, PPC can be a great way to immediately break into a new grocery and start producing website commerce. But with rising CPCs and unmitigated clink forgery, PPC can also get really expensive quickly. Even the most skilled digital marketers can struggle to run rewarding Google Ads campaigns.

For this reason, getting more out of your PPC spend is not only about properly optimizing; it’s about abusing all of that PPC data to determine a smarter SEO strategy. In this article, I’ll break down how to use your Google Ads safaruss as prospecting tools for SEO.

Why PPC is an effective short term strategy, but SEO is the long game.

With PPC, it’s critical to remember that you’re in essence “renting” visits to your website in the short-term.

Brands that rely heavily on revenue from paid than organic rummage are merely one crisis away from having their business turn upside down. The minute you stop paying for search ads is the moment your commerce dehydrates up.

You can certainly jumpstart traffic with paying pursuit, but if you’re on a budget this strategy can be difficult to maintain.

Unlike PPC, organic SEO stands symbols to earn that same commerce without , and if done correctly, continue to benefit over epoch. That doesn’t imply Google Ads can’t be a valuable one of the purposes of your commerce strategy, but putting all your eggs in one basket can come back to haunt you.

Depending on the tournament and the rate at which you build your site power, seeing the honors of SEO can take months. That’s why PPC is one of my favorite ways to quickly start testing out digital strategy and sales processes.

To promise well, you need to properly optimize your Google Ads safarus

Before we look at how PPC campaigns can help with SEO, it’s critical to ensure you’re previously optimizing your PPC campaigns first.

There is a lot that goes into optimizing Google Ads campaigns, here are some

1) Take an iterative approach

Most likely, your first campaign will not be profitable. But an unprofitable safarus can still give you lades of data concerning your primed of keyword targets, order amounts, ad formats, and the details you need to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns.

For example, if your ad is being prompted for irrelevant hunting periods or engendering the wrong types of clicks, add those periods to your negative keyword list. If your ads are making impress but not sounds, revamp your ad replica and is directed towards preparing them more relevant.

In words of the ideal length of a PPC campaign, I recommend you have enough monthly budget to acquire at least a few hundred clicks( you need enough shifts to calculate a statistically significant conversion rate .) In my experience three months of PPC budget is enough time to iterate your optimizations and prospect for SEO.

Make tiny accommodations, check your results, then implement brand-new modifies accordingly.

2) Use single keyword ad radicals

Many PPC managers agree that one of the best optimization patterns is single keyword ad radicals. Yes, it takes more work for your marketing crews, but sheets with the most relevant ad copy was usually improve click-through-rate and conversions.

Single Keyword AdGroup Structure( Image source: LinkGraph)

I find the SKAG campaign structure to be incredibly supportive, and it use only one keyword per ad group( rather than one ad radical targeting numerou keywords ). SKAGs make it easier to determine which keywords will perform well or not for SEO because 😛 TAGEND

The SKAGs with the highest CTRs and transitions is very likely to be acquiring SEO keywords SKAGs help uncover relevant inquiry expressions that are worth targeting organically SKAGs oblige split testing easier( the next optimization stair) and can help you identify the most effective headlines and descriptions that you can utilize on SEO-driven pages.

3) Write highly-targeted ad copy and implement A/ B testing

If you’re structuring your safaruss properly and using SKAGs, you can create unique text ads for each target keyword in an ad group. With the Google Ads built-in A/ B testing facet, you can also test out different headlines or descriptions to examine which play-acts better.

With the “Optimize, ” ad rotation create, ad sufficed get weighted toward the ad that statistically appears to perform better. To lope a suitable A/ B exam, you need to have a clearly defined variant that you are testing, as well as two positions of ad emulate that are unique enough to produce different upshots. In the below sample, the description is the variant being tested, and the data shows that the B variant acted better( despite far fewer impressions ).

Example of Google Ads A/ B testing feature

One of the most common pitfalls of A/ B testing is that advertisers test out too many discrepancies making it difficult to determine why one ad accomplished better over another. For these considerations, it’s important to only test one variant at a time.

4) Use a Google Ads bid simulator to determine the expenditure you’re willing to pay

A bid strategy are eventually romp a big part of pay less for better clicks in PPC campaigns. There are benefits and drawbacks to manual and automatic entreat, but both require advertisers to determine appropriate keyword dictations for their highest-value keywords–marketing effectively is hard work!

The Google Ads dictation simulator is a great tool for discover this magic number. Many digital marketers often determined their max proposals too high and end up overpaying for clicks.

Google Ads dictation simulator for the keyword “kitchen curtains.”

The degree of the curve can assist you influence an appropriate price to set your max entreat quantity. Where the curve flattens off shows where increasing your order will exclusively to be translated into negligible traffic increases.

In the above example, if you increase CPC from $1.41 to $3.00, the insignificant cost-per-click for the incremental freight is over two times more expensive for only 7% more impressions. I would entreat $1.07- $1.41 here.

5) Optimize your platform sheets for changeover

The work of PPC doesn’t end after the clink. Although some labels move PPC campaigns just for brand awareness, performance-based expeditions are easier to measure, and in my view, changeovers should be the ultimate goal of paying for your clinks. This means your PPC landing pages need to be designed to be efficient mouse catches. Check out CXL’s guide on how to build high converting disembark pages to help ensure your landing pages are optmized.

How to use PPC Campaigns to Prospect your SEO strategy

Once you’ve optimized your Google Ads safaruss and start buying clinks, you will begin collecting loadings of data not only about whether your PPC campaign formation is effective, but whether or not you can redeploy it in SEO.

PPC campaigns can help digital marketers simultaneously assessment out three things: 1) keyword targeting, 2) traffic character, and 3) their website’s conversion funnel.

1) Use PPC specifying the high-value keywords for which your website can realistically rank

One of the most advantageous elements of a PPC campaign is it helps digital marketers exam out sure-fire keywords before designing an SEO strategy around grading organically for them.

The Search Terms Report is the best place to go to get information about your keyword targeting.

Example of a Google Ads Search Terms Report

It’s important be pointed out that your Google Ads is not solely prompted for the search phrases or statements that you are additional to your safarus, even if “youre using” “Exact Match.”

So be sure to review your search calls report to see the various quotations your ads are being triggered for and implement that data.

There will likely be countless investigation expressions that are generating sounds that weren’t originally on your radar. This report will too give you a broader sense of the long-tail keyword discrepancies that present SEO opportunities, because those keywords are often less competitive to grade for( but still have high search intent ). You can then develop brand-new landing sheets or blog affixes that are optimized for those long-tail phrases.

The search periods that engender tone sounds help establish that those keywords are likely worth targeting in SEO. If you find hunting words in this report that are not relevant to your products or services but your ads are showing up, there is likely something off with your keyword targeting.

There are of course countless possibilities for this, but the most common missteps are that your keywords are either too wide-reaching or they are multi-intent keywords that bringing traffic that is not necessarily in the sales funnel. To correct this, supplemented those keywords with less relevant to a negative keyword list.

The cost-per-conversion of your Google Ads can also help you understand the potential long-term economic value of ranking organically for certain keywords.

Google Ads cost-per-conversion metrics

If it would cost hundreds to thousands of dollars to render clicks in a PPC campaign, but you can find a way to get that same traffic to perpetuity from organic rankings, you are eligible to impel significant headroom with a view to improving the overall ROI of your marketing spend.

SEO has a wonderful way of drastically lowering cost-per-acquisition over period. Once you understand which examine words have had the opportunity to generate sounds and customers, you can optimize your website to grade for those same keywords and get the same traffic( but this time, for free .)

2) Understand traffic excellence and the economic value of clinks

The second major assistance of PPC is that you can use their safaruss to prospect the economic caliber of the traffic that comes with specific keywords.

What moves traffic have economic value? If it enters your transition funnel.

Naturally, Google commissions advertisers more fund when the data shows that the keyword is more likely to result in alterations for your business. But any well-seasoned digital marketer will tell you that high-pitched CPCs don’t always instantly translate into aspect traffic.

If a used sounds on your search ad and doesn’t enter the conversion pour on your website, you’ve basically paid for nothing. The significances can be deadly: Low-quality traffic( whether from click fraud or erroneous keyword targeting ), higher cost-per-conversions, lower Quality Scores, and higher CPCs in the long run. So the best place to understand the traffic quality of those keywords targets is by expending Google Analytics.

Another crucial step in optimized PPC campaigns is setting up proper tracking( this is especially important for B2Bs where marketing attribution is already somewhat touchy .) If you’re not doing so once, it’s critical to link your Google Ads note with Google Analytics so you hear exactly what your site’s tourists are doing once they arrive on your website via a paid click.

Here are some of the Google Analytics metrics that provide insight into the quality of your PPC clicks. Remember, bad keyword targeting and insignificant ad messaging is bound to return low-quality clicks( but that’s on you ).

Geographical position: Traffic from particular geographic areas can imply site visitors with smaller plans or less buying power. To understand buying power even more, you can use geo-targeting to segment gatherings in their PPC campaigns by sphere and compare changeover paces and economic value. When it comes to applying this to your SEO strategy, although some keywords may have high global research volume, it doesn’t guarantee the traffic will have strong buying message. Desktop vs. Mobile: In general, mobile has a lower changeover pace for most commodities and accompanieds wildly different traffic than desktop. A poorly designed mobile version of your area may prevent modified users from entering your changeover move, but if a great deal of your PPC clinks are coming from desktop but are not converting, it could be a sign of low-quality traffic with less buying purport.

Desktop versus mobile alteration rates moved in Google Analytics.( Image Source: Hallam)

Exit Rate: This metric represents the rate at which beings leave your website on specific pages. If your exit rate is high on those pages that have passed capture formations, pricing knowledge, or checkout sheets, it’s likely that traffic is not ready to convert or make a purchase and should be categorized as low-quality.

Exit rate metrics on Google Analytics

Low-quality traffic can destroy your PPC campaigns, with organic SEO there’s more room for wrongdoing. Even if “its easy to” to grade for a specific keyword organically, Google doesn’t consider site traffic in its higher-ranking algorithm. Although that low-quality traffic might have brand awareness value, the SEO value is little to none.

3) Evaluation whether your ground pages are well-designed to convert

PPC campaigns also render the opportunity to test your website’s conversion funnel. With Google Ads conversion tracking, you can get a great sense of whether your bring sheets are pulling their force and navigating useds toward the desired shift action.

To set up conversion tracking, you need to select which transition acts you want to track. For ecommerce fellowships you’ll likely want to track when a customer adds pieces to their shopping cart. For B2B or B2C brand( where the next step in the sales funnel isn’t definitely a buy) you may want to track acts like contribute organize submissions, downloads, or demo bookings.

Example of shift actions that can be tracked in a Google Ads campaign

If specific alteration actions are significantly higher with your PPC campaigns, your land sheets that grade well will likely benefit from harnessing same CTAs, guide captivate ways, or motif elements.

Traditionally, specialized PPC landing pages examine much different than SEO-driven landing sheets. With PPC, shoring sheets generally present customers with a more nasty call to action, limit the content depth on the page, or sometimes even remove the nav bar to prevent users from browsing through the website.

Illustration of a bring sheet designed for SEO and one designed for PPC( Image Source: TempleToaster)

These design constituents can often conflict with what it takes to get a landing page to rank organically( e.g. In-depth content, breadcrumbs, external links, info architecture, rich media, etc .)

Use your PPC campaigns to research out different land page designing points or conversion-optimized practices and identify what works best. Some ideas include 😛 TAGEND

Number and placement of of CTAs; Design constituents like typefaces, dyes, size of buttons, etc; Conversion-optimized boasts like sticky prohibits; Removal of piloting menu.

You can also send PPC clinks to acre pages that already have strong keyword positions, or you are familiar with have grading possible, to test whether your conversion expedition will restate for customers who arrive to your website organically.

Judgment

PPC campaigns can be a great way to generate sounds in the short term, but are also incredibly helpful with a view to improving your overall SEO strategy as well.

Though coming at a cost, PPC campaigns provide incredible amounts of valuable data relating to keyword targets, traffic, and whether your website is or isn’t conversion optimized.

Here are the key takeaways to execute a SEO prospecting process with your PPC campaigns.

Use your PPC campaigns to identify the highest value keywords for your SEO strategy — keywords that get notions, clicks, and producing aspect congestion to your website. Expectation traffic caliber by linking your Google Ads campaigns with your Google Analytics account. Look at the data to help you determine buying meaning, such as geographic location, traffic by invention character, and exit pace. Apply Google Ads alteration freight to test and iterate on your website’s conversion funnel. Incorporate the conversion-optimized design components that worked in your PPC campaigns to your SEO-driven sheets. Or, mail PPC traffic to your SEO-driven sheets to test the conversion journey.

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