How to Use the Synergy Between PPC & Seo to Leverage Campaigns

Often, PPC (paid search adver­tis­ing) and SEO (“free” organ­ic search engine opti­miza­tion) are treat­ed as sep­a­rate, oppos­ing channels.

Dif­fer­ent peo­ple might be in charge of each task for the same web­site, using sep­a­rate com­pa­ny resources, with diver­gent objectives.

How­ev­er, this way of look­ing at PPC and SEO dis­counts a basic truth.

Because of how search engines work, and due to the data (your web­site) they use to eval­u­ate your sub­mis­sions to their search results pages, there’s more inter­ac­tion between the two mar­ket­ing chan­nels than you might think.

We want to argue that shar­ing infor­ma­tion between ser­vices, and shar­ing objec­tives in search engine mar­ket­ing – whether you’re a prac­ti­tion­er of SEO or PPC – is ben­e­fi­cial to everyone.

To that end, in this arti­cle, we’ll look at:

• Shared pres­ence on the SERPs.
• Ben­e­fits of PPC on organ­ic searcher behavior.
• Ben­e­fits of SEO on PPC costs and ratings.
• Shared search engine resources.

Taking a Closer Look at the SERPs

The syn­er­gy between SEO and PPC is imme­di­ate­ly clear on the search results pages.

Paid links and nat­ur­al links are both dis­played with­in the same space and there­fore com­pete against one another.

Since the cre­ation of Google AdWords (now Google Ads), Google seems to have often giv­en the lion’s share of ben­e­fits to spon­sored links. They’re dis­played above the fold, they ben­e­fit from a dou­ble pres­ence with Google Shop­ping ads, etc.

If we look at the his­to­ry of how paid results are dis­played, we see grow­ing inter­fer­ence as it becomes hard­er to dis­tin­guish between paid and organ­ic results.

The col­ored back­ground applied to paid results in the ear­ly SERPs has dis­ap­peared. The col­or and posi­tion of the “AD” label that has become increas­ing­ly subtle.

It’s clear that Google’s pol­i­cy is to pro­mote a clos­ing of the visu­al gap between the two chan­nels. This leads to a decrease in the sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences between user behav­iors for each type of result.

Using Paid Results to Boost Organic Results

Var­i­ous stud­ies have found that search users who see an ad are more like­ly to click on organ­ic results from the same website.

As Rand Fishkin explained in 2017:

“See­ing these two [results] togeth­er bias­es you, bias­es searchers to gen­er­al­ly be more like­ly to click these than they oth­er­wise would inde­pen­dent of one anoth­er. This is why many peo­ple will bid on their brand ads.”

In many cas­es, this con­tin­ues to be true today.

Using SEO to Boost the Quality Score

Patents from Daryl Preg­i­bon show that qual­i­ty score cal­cu­la­tion takes into account many ele­ments like the CTR, the CPC, etc. The algo­rithm also ana­lyzes the con­tent of the land­ing page and the con­tent of the ad to estab­lish coherence.

This is sup­port­ed by evi­dence that qual­i­ty of the page and the con­tent, opti­mized for search, has a con­firmed impact on the ad Qual­i­ty Score.

This is one way, from a very sim­plis­tic point of view, that SEO can have a ben­e­fi­cial impact on the costs asso­ci­at­ed with PPC. In short, it can con­tribute to keep­ing the CPA down, thus increas­ing the ROI.

Taking a Closer Look at How Search Engines Work

Evidence from Patents

We’ve only seen a few patents assigned to Google on the sub­ject of algo­rithms spe­cif­ic to paid search so far.

How­ev­er, many patents exist for organ­ic search. Among them, we can find ideas that are almost cer­tain­ly reused in paid search.

For exam­ple, the Qual­i­ty Score dis­cussed above plays a dis­crim­i­na­to­ry role in an ad. It can impact the ad’s posi­tion as well as the asso­ci­at­ed CPC. But the qual­i­ty score isn’t a con­cept lim­it­ed to paid search.

Among the patents pub­lished by Navneet Pan­da, of the Pan­da update fame, there is one that devel­ops the idea of a Qual­i­ty Score, in this case asso­ci­at­ed with a website.

In short, a website’s response to a first group of key­words allows that site to be cat­e­go­rized with regard to the respons­es pro­vid­ed. A more pre­cise cat­e­go­riza­tion is achieved with the sec­ond group of key­words. (Here we find notions like web­site clus­ter­i­za­tion: a main cat­e­go­ry and sec­ondary categories.)

Based on the two groups of key­words and on the prod­uct results, the qual­i­ty score of the site is deter­mined. The qual­i­ty score then is most like­ly used in rank­ing algo­rithms and E‑A-T-like analy­sis by Google.

As a result, PPC can allow you to test the per­ti­nence of cer­tain key­words for your site. It can be use­ful before imple­ment­ing an SEO modification.

When look­ing at a dis­crim­i­nat­ing met­ric such as the click-through rate, for exam­ple, it is rea­son­able to assume that sim­i­lar results can be achieved through organ­ic channels.

Evidence from Crawl Behavior

Let’s see where the rela­tion­ship between paid and organ­ic search can get inter­est­ing. We’ll look at the dis­tri­b­u­tion of crawl bud­get between the dif­fer­ent Google-owned bots that eval­u­ate websites.

What the SEO indus­try calls “crawl bud­get” is not lim­it­ed to SEO but also includes the crawl require­ments for PPC. In fact, Google eval­u­ates the needs of both of these mar­ket­ing chan­nels when dis­trib­ut­ing resources giv­en to a site.

One of the first indi­ca­tions of this fact is the Explo­ration Sta­tis­tics report in the old ver­sion of the Google Search Con­sole. In this report – the only data Google pro­vides web­mas­ters on Google­bot crawl behav­ior – we get a glob­al overview of the crawl fre­quen­cy, or page vis­its per day, for all Google­bots, with­out distinction.

In oth­er words, the offi­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tion by Google is an amal­ga­ma­tion all Google-owned bots. This includes not only the bots Google uses for SEO eval­u­a­tion (Goog­ble­bot, Google­bot-Image…), but also the bots Google uses for PPC (Ads­Bot-Google, Ads­Bot-Google-Mobile, AdsBot-Google-Mobile-Apps…).

Break­ing down this analy­sis by types of bot will high­light the dif­fer­ent inter­ac­tions. Because this infor­ma­tion is not pro­vid­ed by Google, you will need to look at your serv­er log files to obtain it.

In fact, log analy­sis of the behav­ior of the dif­fer­ent bots can reveal that web mar­ket­ing actions can have a direct impact on the crawl bud­get of the web­site. This is true for both SEO and PPC actions.

The impact is not lim­it­ed to the chan­nel in which the action orig­i­nat­ed, but impacts both SEO and PPC crawl budget.

One way to demon­strate this is to look at crawl anom­alies, or unusu­al bot behav­ior. To do this, we’ll use R and the Anom­aly Detec­tion pack­age devel­oped by Twit­ter. (This is the pack­age used to iden­ti­fy Trend­ing Topics.)

We’ll first pin­point the dates on which the num­ber of hits by the var­i­ous AdBots is high­er or low­er than the nor­mal­ized stan­dard for a giv­en website.

Cor­re­lat­ed with the dai­ly aver­age CPC, we start to see the inter­ac­tions between invest­ment and crawl demand. High­er spend­ing gen­er­ates high­er crawl demand.

By apply­ing the same analy­sis on SEO bots (Google­bot), we can see the result­ing cause and effect in the bots’ behavior.

If the amount of dai­ly spend­ing ded­i­cat­ed to spon­sored links is too low, the cor­re­la­tion may not be par­tic­u­lar­ly strong.

How­ev­er, we’ve found that the cor­re­la­tion exists when the amount of Google Ads spend­ing is above aver­age for a giv­en peri­od. This is often due to increased invest­ment to sup­port a spe­cif­ic event, such as Black Friday.

This sort of research on anom­aly detec­tion should be con­duct­ed per indus­try sec­tor and per type of site. The effect of the cor­re­la­tion can vary sig­nif­i­cant­ly from site to site and from busi­ness to business.

In short, Google con­sid­ers PPC invest­ment as a dis­crim­i­na­to­ry met­ric for allo­cat­ing explo­ration resources, both for PPC and SEO bots. This can also trig­ger an increased crawl demand for SEO bots on land­ing pages for paid ads.

Applying PPC-SEO Relationship Knowledge to Marketing Strategy

The Evidence

So far we have seen that:

• There is a demon­stra­ble cor­re­la­tion between PPC and SEO cam­paigns. This includes but is not lim­it­ed to the influ­ence of SEO on crit­i­cal ele­ments of PPC eval­u­a­tion, such as Qual­i­ty Score.
• The co-exis­tence of PPC and SEO results on the same SERPs makes inter­ac­tion unavoid­able, whether it comes in the form of direct com­pe­ti­tion or in a boost to SEO click-through rates.
• Patent stud­ies sup­port the idea that search engine algo­rithms share con­cepts between PPC and SEO. The sim­i­lar­i­ty behind cer­tain func­tions means that best prac­tices in one chan­nel may also influ­ence the oth­er. Like­wise, the way web­sites are eval­u­at­ed may mean that opti­miz­ing for one chan­nel will also affect the other.
• Study­ing cor­re­la­tions between crawl anom­alies in log files shows us that Google’s crawl demand for both chan­nels can be expand­ed dur­ing impor­tant events. This is espe­cial­ly true of events that require strong tac­tics through one chan­nel or the oth­er (increased spend­ing, release of an opti­miza­tion batch).

Actionable Conclusions

In con­crete terms, how should we apply this knowl­edge to a mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy?

PPC has the mer­it of being more tan­gi­ble and fac­tu­al: $1 invest­ed brings in $X in rev­enue. It is con­se­quent­ly eas­i­er to mea­sure ROI, CPA (cost per acqui­si­tion), cost per key­word, or bid lev­el with PPC.

All these met­rics make paid search more appeal­ing to mar­keters who want or need to pro­vide traf­fic pre­dic­tions and also to project poten­tial revenues.

SEO may appear to be less of a black box, how­ev­er, once we con­sid­er that there is sig­nif­i­cant inter­ac­tion between PPC and SEO invest­ment, search appear­ances, and user behav­ior. This inter­ac­tion makes it nec­es­sary to take into account the coex­is­tence of both mar­ket­ing methods.

The tac­tics put in place to uncov­er key fac­tors for suc­cess, par­tic­u­lar­ly when there are recur­ring process­es or cam­paigns, are impor­tant. They allow you to keep a larg­er part of the crawl resources attrib­uted to your site by Google.

SEO can con­tribute to the improve­ment of the Qual­i­ty Score and bring a more fine-grained per­spec­tive to the choice of keywords.

It is also worth­while to dig into tan­gi­ble PPC data to serve SEO ends: the num­ber of con­ver­sions, the aver­age CTR, the con­tent that dri­ves the great­est num­ber of clicks or con­ver­sions. And vice-versa.

It boils down to this: know­ing what one hand is doing may help the oth­er to accom­plish goals, and even explain search engine behav­ior that is puz­zling when each mar­ket­ing chan­nel is exam­ined on its own.

SOURCE: Search Engine Journal