Most decision makers in the marketing and sales departments know they need SEO, Google PPC Ads, Social Media, and Public Relations to make their online and offline sales soar. If you’re reading this, I’m talking to you. I know what you’re thinking, how can I better understand how these channels impact each other so I can squeeze the most juice out of my online marketing campaigns?
How SEO Impacts PPC
Understanding on-page SEO basics will help you understand how to optimize a landing page for AdWord’s keyword quality score. Having a positive keyword quality score in your PPC campaign is critical for the success of an AdWords campaign. This is a perfect example of how SEO and PPC impact each others channels.
Have you ever been to a library, looked up a book, and searched the hundreds of rows of books? If you have then you know how crucial the labeling and indexing of that book is crucial to finding it on the shelf. Think of Google being a huge library indexing your webpages, the better you label your webpage, the better Google will understand the content of your website and landing pages, the easier it is to show search engine users what they are looking for.
What is Quality Score in AdWords?
Target keywords in AdWords that you bid on have a quality score. Google determines the quality score to ensure they are showing the most useful ads in the highest positions. The more relavent your landing page is to the keyword you are bidding on, the better your quality score will be. For the advertiser this can be challenging if they don’t have full control over optimizing the page.
Components of a quality score are:
- Ad Relevance
- Average expected CTR
- Below-average landing page experience
The area where SEO can impact PPC is the landing page experience. By optimizing a landing page for keyword relevance you’re targeting for PPC, you can increase the relevancy and increase your quality score, therefore increasing the quality score.
Related: SEO vs. PPC – Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Also running some technical diagnostics on pages like page speed will help you improve the landing page experience. It’s recommended to run some Conversion Rate Optimization tests as well in order to understand user behavior so you can increase conversion rates. Having a higher conversion rate on the page will signal that the landing page is relevant to the search query and what the user is looking for.
The benefits of increasing a quality score include:
- Lower cost per-click (Decreasing ad spend and potential increasing ROAS)
- Better ad positions (More clicks and more impressions)
How to Optimize a Landing Page for Relevance
Think of your landing page as an outline for an essay. Remember in college when you had to turn in an outline for approval. A landing page is similar in structure.
The main components of outlining a landing page:
- Title tag
- Meta description
- Headings
- H1
- H2
- H3
Title tag: The title tag is the page title that appears at the top of a webpage and is the first element that Google looks at, so it’s really important to make sure your title tag clearly describes what the page is about. Matching up your target keywords in PPC with the target keywords for SEO will help with your landing page relevancy and should impact your overall quality score.
Meta descriptions: The meta descriptions are similar to your ad copy. For SEO you increase your rankings by increasing click-through rates (CTR). By having a higher CTR, you are seen as being relevant and will slowly work your way up to a higher position on the page.
Heading Structure: Having a clear header structure with search term variations helps people scan the page to find what they are looking for. Not only is this great for increasing the user experience, but it’s great for Google’s crawlers when they scan your site and pages for their indexing process.
Another great benefit to PPC of driving new users through the organic traffic is that you can create retargeting audiences and stalk them around the internet.
How SEO And Content Work Together
If you haven’t heard it before, content is king in the world of search engine optimization. I could do an entire blog post about this. Without content, you wouldn’t have SEO. There are a couple ways to think about content marketing:
Writing and Optimizing Content for Relevancy
On-page optimization and relevancy (Google loves relevancy) In a study by backlinkp.com, they found that Writing and optimizing content for relevance on a specific topic helps increase rankings. They also discovered that “longer content tends to rank higher in Google’s search results.” We optimize high-quality content for semantic search using a tool that pulls in the top ranking content on page one. The tool then compares your content up against the competitors and suggest relevant long-tail keywords to implement and boost your on-page SEO.
We’re able to make optimizations to the content in the tool and get live content scores updates. We keep working on the content until we can get up to the average score or better.
Linkability Or Link AttractionRelated: A Holistic Approach to Blogging – Contextual Content Clusters
Writing long-form highly relevant content is preferred by Google, so is content that offers users helpful information. When other bloggers are looking for sources to list, they will link to your article. Collecting backlinks is still one of the most important factors in ranking a website organically.
Shareability for Social Sharing
When you capture a new user’s attention and they like your article so much that they share it to their network, then boom! You’ve just increased your organic reach. There has been talk that social signals increase rankings, but haven’t been confirmed. There is an association with lover articles being shared more often and acquiring more links. At the end of the day, you want users to enjoy your content so much that they share it therefore increasing your website/brand’s visibility across the web.
How SEO And Social Media Marketing Work Together
I sort of touched based on this in the above paragraph, but there are a couple other ways where search and social work together. One in particular is that when you create profiles on certain social media sites you get a link pointing back to your site. Pinterest is a great place to share your content to win some quick backlink authority to boost your domain authority.
These days social media networks are search engines in of themselves. Get found on social media sites by sharing your content!
Paid Social Advertising
Another great opportunity for social media marketers to capitalize on your organic search traffic is to create remarketing campaigns. Organic traffic tends to be top of the funnel brand introducers. These customers are often shopping around and kicking tires. It’s beneficial for you to create dynamic retargeting campaign targeting customers to show them the exact product they were just looking at so you can reel them back in. For eCommerce sites it’s a common practice to create an offer for users who abondoned their cart to bring them back and convert.
Post Promotion and Traffic Tiers
Creating long-form education content is great material for social media advertisers to use in their cold traffic tier. Once they introduce the brand through that ad and received an engagement, they can move those users on to the next tier of traffic. The goal is to continue to push them down the conversion funnel and ultimately win a conversion.
How SEO And Digital Public Relations Work Together
As I mentioned above, backlinks are still one of the most critical ranking factors when it comes to search engine optimization. An SEO savy digital public relations professional knows how important it is to pitch and target site with a high domain authority and a clean backlink profile.
Related: Content, SEO, & PR – Three Peas in a Pod
Understanding a Website’s Domain Authority (DA)
A website’s domain authority is based on a 1-100 scale. The site is scaled based off the backlink profile of a site. Sites with highy-relevant authoritative backlinks usually achieve a high domain authority. Linking root domains outweigh total external links when comparing your domain authority to your competitors. You want to get high-quality unique links from individual domains versus getting a bunch of links on the same sites over and over again.
Sites with low quality links to their site can be toxic. It’s really important for you to know all the risks associated with linkbuilding. There have been recent Penguin updates that have significantly impacted websites. Luckily for our clients, they benefited because of our proprietary link detox process.
How to Check for a Spammy Backlink Profile
Before pitching a site we vet them through a thorough process of checking their backlink profile. We look at the domain authority, citation flow, and trust flow. Based of this research we categorize them based on potential risk factors. You don’t want a site with a fishy backlink profile linking to you. That link could hurt more than help your SEO efforts.
Channel Attribution And Understanding Assisted Conversions
This is HUGE! More often than not, Direct traffic gets the credit for Organic conversions. People tend to visit your site organically then later convert through the direct channel. It’s really important to understand how the organic channel impacts other channels and vica versa.
One area in Google Analytics that I like to poke around in to kind answers in in the conversion section. Navigate to the Multi-Channel Funnel reports and click on Top Conversion Paths. Then filter for organic traffic and Wha-la! There you have it. A detailed look at how many people entered organically and converted through a different channel.
Another great place to see the impact your organic traffic is having on the overall conversions on the site is the Model Comparison Tool. Since Organic traffic tends to be the first touch and Google uses the last interaction by default, you can use this tool to compare the first interaction vs. the last interaction. Navigate to the Conversions section of your Google Analytics profile and drill down into Attribution > Model Comparison Tool. Here you can look at your conversions and the value of that conversion. You can compare the values and look at the delta to gauge whether or not you’re making an impact with assisting conversions through a particular channel.
Wrapping Up
There are many ways SEO can impact or influence other channels and many ways to take advantage and measure that impact. One of the motos here at Power Digital is to Always Be Learning (ABL). We are always thinking of new ways to measure and analyse our activities so we aren’t missing any new ways to achieve results for our clients.
In addition to that, we are also double-triple checking that we are not making any moves that could potentially harm a campaign. There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to SEO and integrating channels, but when your team is all under one roof, it’s makes it easier to make changes and move quick when identifying a new opportunity.