{"id":77,"date":"2021-04-28T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-28T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/explicitly.me\/?p=77"},"modified":"2021-04-28T21:01:21","modified_gmt":"2021-04-28T21:01:21","slug":"ppc-as-an-seo-research-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/explicitly.me\/ppc-as-an-seo-research-tool\/","title":{"rendered":"PPC As An SEO Research Tool"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paid search gives you many options to test and play with the SERPs and Keywords in a way that SEO cant. I have used PPC on several occasions to make decisions around SEO, and quite successfully. It is often hard for businesses to understand the \u201cvalue\u201d of SEO, and I know for a fact that most big brands use Paid Search as a medium more extensively than Organic Search. The budgets for SEO are often a fraction of those allocated to PC. Yet businesses are still to understand that Paid Search budgets have a \u201cone hit\u201d shelf life, while SEO ROI is for much longer periods.<\/p>\n

In financially motivated businesses often SEO is undervalued when the SEO teams fail to show profit \/ ROI centric nature of organic search, and I often end up reaching the benefits of looking at SEO from the lens of a Paid Search marketer. \u00a0SEO should not focus purely on traffic potential of keywords, but on the profit potential of keywords.\u00a0<\/strong>In the past several\u00a0studies\u00a0have shown that PPC gets more budget than SEO.<\/p>\n

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Some of the areas that you can use Paid Search for include:<\/p>\n

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Your Meta Description and Title tags are important from a User Click Through point of view. Using PPC copy tests you can determine what messages get better click throughs from the SERPs \u2013 especially testing variant permanent Title Appends. \u00a0For example I found that a brand that used \u201cofficial\u201d in their PPC copy gained a CTR upwards of 5% better than previous.<\/p>\n

So we switched the PPC messages from the \u201cbrand keywords\u201d to more sales oriented copy, while switching the home page title tag to include the words \u201cofficial site\u201d. Organic SEO from branded keywords grew, while PPC traffic dropped, and the joint traffic improved.<\/p>\n

Results?<\/strong>\u00a0More free traffic for their branded keywords.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s not always easy to determine which long tail or three word \/ four word phrases to target, ideally you want them all, but sometimes time and budget limitations won\u2019t let you target all the variants. In my experience any keyword can have between 10-50 variations, especially if you start looking at adding location modifiers to make up phrases.<\/p>\n

How do you determine the rate at which to attack certain sub sets of keywords in terms of optimization priority? I use PPC to help me.<\/p>\n

Create lists and ads for your target KWs and run them for a decent time frame \u2013 for high volume phrases (between 1000-10000 a day) I am usually happy to use a two week timeframe.\u00a0 Let those keywords float in ideal positions (1 and 2) on PPC.\u00a0 You will often find that the site converts better on some, while not on others. There could be many reasons for this \u2013 but at least you will find the most profitable key phrases in any subset to determine your rate of optimization.<\/p>\n

PRO TIP:<\/strong>\u00a0You can use this technique for brand new key words that the business never considered to see if they work \u2013 you often find what I call \u201cEureka<\/strong>\u201d keywords that the site never thought of, but become very profitable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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This exercise is similar to the one above, but in this instance you can use C to determine ROI and budgets. Now I am not unilaterally saying that PPC and SEO ROIs are interchangeable \u2013 they aren\u2019t. But you can often work out some sort of a standard variant where ROI of PPC=(x)SEO (on SERP #y). This sort of formulaic working from historical data could help you determine what to expect when certain keyword sets move up in organic results.<\/p>\n

PPC has a better conversion rate. It\u2019s true that PPC converts slightly higher than SEO in a keyword-to-keyword comparison. But 88% of the traffic comes from SEO and 12% from PPC.\u00a0Rand Fishkin in his presentation PPC vs SEO<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cross referencing the spend on PPC against those keywords will enable you to work out stronger arguments for determining the potential uplift of sales by targeting certain SERP positions for these keywords. This in return allows you to work out the profitability, and hence desirability of those keyword sets \u2013 and in return allows you to allocate more budget towards acquiring those positions.<\/p>\n

In a ROI centric business this sort of methodology is essential in working out SEO Budgets and actually increasing the value of SEO visibly to businesses.<\/p>\n

Almost half of UK companies (49%) are now spending at least \u00a350,000 a year on paid search marketing, up from 45% last year and 39% in 2008, while there has been a significant decrease in the proportion of responding companies who spend less than \u00a35,000 a year on paid search, from 25% last year to 14% this year.\u00a0Econsultancy Search Marketing Benchmark Report<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have covered some of this over at\u00a0SEOmoz on SEO Budgeting.<\/p>\n

Of course none of this looks at the long term Branding value of generic searches and determining longer term ROI time frames for generic Keywords:<\/p>\n

Only 30% of purchases driven by non-branded Internet searches occur within the same online session when consumers conduct an initial search, according to a study by research firm Compete Inc. (source)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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As I have mentioned above, SEO should focus on profitability \u2013 and some of the key aspects of profitability are where you land your site visitors on. For Keyword \u201cX\u201d should you land on the \u201chome page\u201d, \u201ccategory page\u201d or a \u201ccustom built to purpose landing page\u201d?<\/p>\n

In paid search, you can test all three variants. In SEO you may have the potential to rank only one over the other. By the time you realize you have targeted the wrong landing page, it may be too late or taken too long to switch. This can be a costly mistake, and short of conversion optimization on the target SEO page, you can\u2019t do much in the short term.<\/p>\n

I would suggest using PPC testing to determining the best converting pages per keyword sets, you would often be amazed by the results. In one instance I found that the home page is the best converting page \u2013 regardless of what you did for a particular generic keyword. In other situations, when we targeted \u00a0a landing page built for \u00a0\u201cKW\u201d and \u201cKW+Local Modifier\u201d, where we were targeting both the top keyword and the local area \u2013 we found that for the total sets of keywords, it converts worse\u00a0 than the page that WASN\u2019T optimized with page elements for the local modifier. (i.e No mention of the \u201clocal\u201d aspect on the page actually helped the conversion, but made SEO for full range of long tail much more difficult). In the end we had to split it into two pages \u2013 one targeting \u201cKW\u201d and another targeting \u201cKW+Local Modifier\u201d.<\/p>\n

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