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What, if anything, can SEO learn from PPC?
That’s what we’re exploring today with a lady who loves to surf the waves just as much as surfing the web. She has been working between SEO and PPC since 2010. And three years ago, she set up her own SEO and PPC consultancy. A warm welcome to the In Search SEO podcast, Amanda White.
In this episode, Amanda shares three things that SEO can learn from PPC including:
- Generate content ideas
- A/B testing
- Create personas from PPC data
THREE THINGS THAT SEO CAN LEARN FROM PPC WITH AMANDA WHITE
David: Thanks so much for coming on. You can find Amanda over at amandawhitedigital.com. So Amanda, why should SEO and PPC be friends?
Amanda: That age-old question. It’s a really interesting one because in so many previous agencies and roles I’ve worked in SEO and PPC aren’t friends. And it’s so bizarre because the data crosses over in so many ways, and it can be so beneficial for them to be friends. But it’s still in this day and age where you see SEOs won’t share data with PPCs and PPCs keep their data very guarded. It’s their baby and their successes, and they don’t want to share them. But if we were to share that data, there is so much that we can learn, so much that we can gain. When you think about it, the bottom line is the return on investment. And if that comes from SEO or from PPC or both, we have to think about that client and that bottom line for them and work together to make them friends.
D: What’s the optimum setup? Is it SEOs and PPC experts sitting at the same table together just contemplating what they’re doing and building strategies together? Or is it enough to meet up once a week or so?
A: I think it’s very different for different brands. Some agencies will solely do the SEO and then another completely different marketing agency might look after the PPC. So it can’t always be that you’re in the same room in the same building, working side by side, listening to conversations, and jumping in. But as long as you’ve got that meeting up of the two minds, whether that’s a weekly call, a monthly call, face to face, or however you want to do it, and you share your ideas, those ideas coming together can fuel more ideas and make both sides more successful. There needs to be conversations, even if they can’t happen in the same building. With technology now, someone could be in Scotland and someone could be in Cornwall and we can collaborate really well.
D: Yeah, it works so well, globally. I remember having conversations with people 10 years ago on Skype and there was such a lag. But nowadays, it’s so instantaneous, that you almost feel as if you’re in the next room together.
1. Use PPC to generate SEO content ideas.
So today, you’re sharing three things that SEO can learn from PPC. Starting off with number one, use PPC to generate SEO content ideas.
A: Yeah, this is one of my favorites for feeding SEO. I’ve got a really good example I’ve worked with. It’s quite a niche topic and there was a particular topic that was generating some interesting SEO traffic and the topic EGUS, equine gastric ulcer syndrome. I know nothing about this. So we decided we’re going to do a top-of-the-funnel campaign on PPC that literally just uses broad match targeting on what is EGUS. Then using all that data, Google starts to throw back queries around that. What is it? How is it? Why is it? When is it? What causes it? Does this cause it? And then from that data, we were starting to see a ton of research on who, what, where, when, why, and how all around this topic that we hadn’t even thought about, we hadn’t even scratched the surface on. And it turns out that there are a lot of people out there searching for a lot of subjects around this one main topic. So before we knew it, we only spent a couple of weeks on some PPC advertising, sending people to this main EGUS page. And then we were able to mine all that data and pretty much produce a content calendar around each of the subjects to then feed back into that article. So we had a massive resource of questions that people, our customers, were using around that topic that we hadn’t researched and found out about.
One of the things that’s really interesting is that 15% of searches on Google that happen on a daily basis are brand new. Whatever keyword research tool we use, it is always looking at what’s been and gone. Whereas we’re never going to be tapping into that 15% of new queries, new ways of saying things. By running your PPC campaign you can tap into that live as it happens data and use it to your advantage for both SEO and PPC.
D: I’ve used tools like Answer the Public and Also Asked in the past to try and determine longer phrase questions that people have. That sounded like what you’re talking about there. But are you saying that the data available through the process that you suggested is different and might throw up different questions compared with those types of resources?
A: With those sorts of tools, and I know you can get some free trials on them, but the monthly plans can become quite costly if you need a monthly service. Whereas you could run a small two-week campaign on one particular topic, and you’ve got that data forevermore. If you wanted to use it for the next 12 months, you wouldn’t then have to keep running the same campaign, you could do it on a topic basis. And some of the keywords when they’re on broad match for some quite niche topics can be really cheap. You can get a lot of data for not a lot of outlay.
2. Use PPC for SEO A/B testing
D: Understood. And the second way that SEO can learn from PPC is to use PPC for SEO A/B testing.
A: Absolutely. One of the things with SEO is it is a slow, long burner. It’s a long process, lots of time investment, and changes can happen very gradually. There are also a lot of external factors at play. There are algorithm updates or competitors that are maybe doing more work than you’re doing. The goalposts are always moving with SEO. But when you combine it with PPC, like meta descriptions, for example, you could put some descriptions into your ad copy. And you can test all those descriptions and see which one has the highest click-through rate. If you’ve then got those descriptions and you can see one that stands out the best, we can then move that across and use that same description for our SEO campaign.
And I know in Search Console you can push updates through a bit quicker, but you’re at Google’s mercy for when they’re going to roll out those updates and you’ll see those changes indexed and appear live. So rather than testing on a monthly basis where you keep changing things with your meta descriptions, for example, you can just test them in PPC, get some quick results, and then push that through to SEO.
D: This might be an unfair question, you might not know the answer off the top of your head, but nowadays Google is taking certain meta descriptions directly from the copy on a page. So they’re not necessarily using the meta description that you have on your web page. Is it not the case that meta descriptions aren’t as important as they used to be? Or are you still finding that quite a few Google results are actually using the original meta description?
A: I don’t like the fact that Google changes meta descriptions. If you’ve gone to the effort, even if you have tested it via the PPC, you’ve crafted and scripted it in a particular way, I do feel it’s a little unfair that Google says, “Nope, we know what your website’s about more than you do. And we are going to rewrite it for you.” I understand if you don’t have a meta description, then Google can come in, read what your website’s about, and pop one in for you. It’s trying to be helpful. It’s trying to help you out and it’s trying to help their customers out by showing what the website is about. I feel that the best practice is to always write your own, and then hope that it gets through and Google doesn’t change them.
D: Again, at the end of the day, Google is looking for the highest click-through rates possible, even to your site organically. And the reason that they’re changing things is they think that it’s a more relevant meta description, and they’re going to get a higher click-through rate. So if you do, through your PPC testing, come across a meta description that you think will be much more relevant and result in a higher click-through rate, then I guess Google might at least test it and be more likely to retain it if it does produce well.
A: Yeah, I’d like to think so. We were just saying, whether SEO and PPC talk to each other and there is definitely that element of whether the PPC side of Google talks to the SEO side of Google. Do the things you do in PPC reflect what happens in SEO if Google can see that data on the PPC side? We can analyze everything for our clients or for our own websites. We can really drill home the minute intricacies, whereas, do we think Google’s doing that? I’m not so sure if they’re crossing over the paths.
3. Use PPC data to create personas for SEO content
D: And the third thing that you can learn from PPC is to use PPC data to create personas for SEO content.
A: I really like this one. When we think about SEO content, we quite often have an audience in mind. Quite often you’ll generate your personas for your brand so that you know who you’re talking to. Quite often in marketing, you’ll say that if you’re marketing to everybody you’re marketing to nobody. You need to know who you’re talking to. And with all the will in the world, we can do data and research and surveys and we can try to work out who we think is our target audience and who we’re trying to talk to. But if you’re running PPC campaigns, you actually have that data pretty much right there. There are affinity audiences and in-market audiences and you can literally see which brackets have the most conversions on them. You can say that actually, it was the homeowners that will read your content more than the married couples. You can start finding out who is engaging most and who is converting most on your content. Then you can write for that specific audience. That data is all there so it’s worth tapping into.
D: I love that. And if you were perhaps starting with a client for the first time, and you’ve established through their PPC campaign who their ideal persona is, and you’ve realized that actually, a lot of the content on the website doesn’t really speak directly to them, how would you go about prioritizing which content on their site to alter first if they’ve got hundreds of pages on their site if not thousands?
A: I’d first have a look at their data, whether that’s in Google Analytics or Google Search Console, and just see which ones are driving the most traffic. If they’re getting traffic and we want to make them better, could they generate more traffic? I’d start by looking at the data that we’ve already got on hand for those clients. There is always that concern that if they’re already driving traffic and then you change it will that then detract away. So you want to be careful that you’re not going completely off the pace. I think starting with that data point and categorizing them by the top 10% to start with and use them as a test case study. And if they improve overall then go to the next 10%, and so forth.
D: Great. And you tend to aim the whole site at an individual persona or is it possible and reasonable to have multiple personas on the same website?
A: I think it’s absolutely possible to have multiple personas. I always use examples around shoes. I love shoes and buying shoes. If you think of a sports shop or website where they’ve got a very different demographic between the women’s shoes and the men’s shoes or very different exercise equipment women’s sports bras, which obviously doesn’t relate to men. You can have those two personas where you’re targeting a very different audience with different content for different sections.
The Pareto Pickle – Image Alt Tags
D: Let’s finish off with the Pareto Pickle. Pareto says that you can get 80% of your results from 20% of your efforts. What’s one SEO activity that you would recommend that provides incredible results for modest levels of effort?
A: I had to think long and hard about this one. With SEO, a lot of businesses have been doing it for a long time and everyone knows about backlink building and content. What do people forget all the time that’s actually really juicy? So I’m going to get back to an obvious one, image alt tags. There were many times when I’d do a full audit of a site and they literally haven’t got anything against any of their images. It’s a lengthy process, it takes a bit of time to describe each image, but for image search, it’s an untapped market. You need to be competitive there. People do go to Images, especially with brands, and look for products, look for ideas, or look for a recipe, these sorts of things. And if you’re not labeling your images and giving them an alternative description, then you’re missing out on that big chunk of SEO traffic. That one’s a biggie that a lot of people forget, a lot of people miss out or just don’t describe uniquely enough to say what’s in the image.
D: Are captions just as important? Because I was browsing an agency website recently and they had their staff section on there and underneath their staff photos, I don’t think it was the names of the staff rather it was like “man in an office in a gray shirt and checked blue trousers.” That was the caption underneath the image. I guess those are the sorts of descriptions that you’d use for alt tags or alt attributes. Would that kind of solution/phraseology be just as important for captions as it is for old attributes?
A: When you go back to the original reason for the alt attributions is for screen readers and for people that are visually impaired to understand what is on a website. I feel like if you’ve got the alt tag there, and you are visually impaired, and you are using that screen reader technology to tell you what’s on the website, I don’t know if you need the description along with the caption. Because if you can see, you can see the picture and if you can’t, you’ve got the alt tag. Is it just an SEO tactic where you’re trying to get the keywords in there multiple times? I probably would say I wouldn’t go for the description as well if you’ve got the alt tag.
D: I’ve been your host, David Bain. You can find Amanda over at amandawhitedigital.com. Amanda, thanks so much for being on the In Search SEO podcast.
A: Thank you for having me, David. Pleasure.
Read more: SEO vs. PPC: Where to Spend Your Budget
