Estudio34 offers a powerful combination of SEO and PPC to help you optimize your spend and targeting more effectively.
So, before creating your next digital strategy, start by creating a communication plan. Focus on using some of the things you learned from each other.
Step 2: Define the SEO and PPC Problem to Solve
First, you and your team should ask yourself:
- Are you paying for the PPC traffic your SEO could have saved?
- Are you doubling the effect of increased traffic by doubling your PPC and SEO results?
- Can you achieve the same conversion if you don’t cover search on both channels?
- Is the conversion rate for the same query higher for PPC or SEO?
Once everyone on your SEO and PPC teams has provided their answers, it’s easy to create a roadmap of the best keywords for each team.
Examples of how to overcome keyword duplication in SEO and PPC
Sometimes it’s easier to learn by example, so let’s take a look at a real marketing problem that had to be solved.
In this example, a grocery store client has a simple but very common problem: Paid campaigns rely heavily on branded and non-branded terms.
client’s Purpose It was to leverage SEO efforts to reduce exposure in paid channels.
of hypothesis What this means is that by targeting key PPC terms that are easily visible in organic search, you can stop bidding on them and, in turn, stop cannibalizing SEO with paid search.
In our case, it goes without saying that we relied heavily on brand terminology. As you may have experienced, investing in PPC keywords with high organic search rankings makes good business sense in protecting coverage in his more crowded SERPs.
Very simplistically, here’s how PPC keyword targeting and SEO are typically set up:
SEO strategy
It tries to define specific terms (AKA: chunky middle, even long tail), then moves to broader terms (AKA: generics), grouping many keywords into buckets (groups in SEOmonitor).
Example: Wooden Toy Kitchen: Global Search Volume 11.4K
PPC strategy
It tries to define broader terms (AKA: broad match) and moves to specific terms (AKA: exact match), grouping many keywords into buckets (AdGroups).
Example: wooden toys or toys: global search volume 53.5K
result
One gets more specific over time (PPC) and the other from day one, but you’ll find that you need to have enough visibility to take advantage of the impact.
The next thing to clarify is what happens when visibility (ranking) is high.
Step 3: Try the Estudio34 Method
These steps are a real, proven pathway to how the Estudio34 team combines SEO and PPC data to improve search visibility while optimizing budgets for both channels.
Step 3.1: Identify Where and How Cannibalization Occurs
Once you’ve reached this point, you and your PPC team should actively communicate and share data.
Unless you actively work with the PPC team, you may not even notice the cannibalization issue.
In this context, cannibalization refers to SEO and PPC targeting the same keywords and competing for traffic instead of being leveraged together. In that case, your search results may include your own competing landing pages, which can lead to low conversions and diversified traffic.
Where does cannibalization often occur?
The PPC team may bid on terms without knowing the SEO side. Or maybe an SEO expert inherited this structure from day one without realizing it was happening.
The point of this strategy is to benefit cross-channel through keyword overlap, so we started our analysis with paid keywords and cross-referenced them with SEO data.
How We Stopped SEO & PPC Keyword Cannibalization
First, we got a list of PPC terms that generated clicks and didn’t convert over a 3-month period. This allows grouping by search queries (SQR reports).
Please note that the timeframe may vary from business to business depending on the amount of data and actual spending during a given period. To see how many terms meet your criteria, you’ll need to test with a date range. I don’t want to be overwhelmed with rows of data, but I want practical and measurable options.
To solve the “not provided” problem and get conversion data at the keyword level, the team at Estudio34 leveraged SEOmonitor’s Organic Traffic module. SEOmonitor brings all the keyword data from Search Console powered by sessions and conversions from Analytics using the common denominator of landing pages.
Once I had the hit list from the PPC team, I uploaded these as new keywords to my rank tracker.
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Image by Estudio34 using keyword groups from SEOmonitor.com, November 2022
We recommend doing this in a separate group. This is mainly because the visibility of groups can be measured and excluded from potential predictions if desired.
Now it’s time to identify the overlap.
Step 3.2: Exclude the Top 3 Ranking Search Terms
In our case, we looked at the top three keywords.
I didn’t want to add new terms unless I was told to, so I did it manually, but SEOmonitor allows you to set up smart groups. This means that all applicable filtering options are automatically added and updated.
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Image by Estudio34 with advanced filters and smart groups on SEOmonitor.com, November 2022
Step 3.3: Exclude Keywords That Contain Ads
I continued to filter in SEOmonitor’s rank tracker and excluded the keywords for which my ads were showing.
Theoretically, this check is unnecessary as we extracted the terms from the PPC campaign.
But it’s good to know in case you need to do it the other way around. Note that certain terms may not be selected due to aggressive bids and when the tool snapshots his SERPs.
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Image by Estudio34 with advanced filters from SEOmonitor.com, November 2022
You’ll also get more visibility into seasonality and SERP features over time.
These are very useful. Because if it’s seasonally irrelevant, it may have no impact to test any term.
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Image by Estudio34 using SEOmonitor.com search and SERP data, Nov 2022
Step 3.4: Test New Keywords
Start by defining the landing pages that specific queries will rank for.
Landing pages help determine how much traffic you get organically and whether it increases or decreases. Similarly, you can evaluate conversions that may have been generated from that landing page. Note that the landing page may serve a pure discovery phase, so conversions may not affect the overall results, so you’re making a concession.
Now you can start testing.
You may be tempted to pause your campaign to see the impact on your organic traffic. However, this is not recommended, mainly because it can affect sales. How you deal with it will help mitigate the risks associated with lost revenue.
Target individual keyword tests as follows:
- Add these keywords as negative keywords on an exact match basis to one or more campaigns (depending on how you set them up).
- Do this for 7-14 days. Again, it may be longer, depending on the amount of data mentioned above.
Now that we have organic traffic to our ranking URLs, we have a snapshot of the before and after effect of negatively excluding keywords from our PPC campaigns.
Compare the timeframe tested with the previous period below.
- Traffic from PPC to the landing page in question.
- Traffic from SEO to the landing page in question.
- Landing page CVR by channel: PPC and SEO.
- Revenue/transactions or goals from both channels.
Look for patterns such as:
- Increase return on ad spend (ROAS) for paid campaigns. This is because we believe that the excluded terms were generating clicks, not conversions (a consideration to consider is that these may have been for discovery purposes, so conversion rates are low). .
- Increased SEO traffic — If duplication is actually contributing to PPC, this should be on the right track.
- conversion. This one can go either way. The ultimate check is higher conversions. However, some conditions on your landing page can lower your conversion rate and result in lower conversions. why? Because you’re getting his SEO traffic, but it may not convert as well as it did when the paid was active. That might be your exception, and doubling it might make sense.
What to do based on the previous pattern:
Retain the excluded term if all three instances are positively satisfied. This means:
- more SEO traffic.
- Improved ROAS (when spending less).
- Higher SEO conversions.
- Same total or higher (PPC + SEO) conversions.
If there is a what-if involved and the client has concerns, do the following:
Address your concerns with an actual agreed plan of action.
As a means of mitigating the potential for lost sales, the first question to ask is whether your SEO traffic will convert worse than if you were targeting paid queries. Our recommended action was to go back to that term and dig into the details: Are the landing pages exactly the same? What can you get from paid campaigns to improve the UX of your SEO pages?
This is where the second advantage of this activity comes into play. Target your SEO terms and landing pages by leveraging on-page optimization and explicit targeting of landing pages used in PPC:
- Paid landing page content focused on conversions.
- Ad copy can provide a meta description.
- Ad copy titles are useful for CTR meta titles (be careful here as they can affect ranking fluctuations).
- The wrong page was ranking for the term at hand. In other words, paid search told us which landing pages were better.
- You should double it, but only at certain times or days of the week based on where you are in the process.
For this client, we found that switching exact terminology, including branding, yielded the best results. Mainly because we had competitive costs and excellent conversion rates.
In general terms, the results were mixed. Still, on a high note, it makes sense to say that if you have good SEO, you will almost certainly win.
Step 3.5: Evaluate Results
For this client, we targeted a test with 1,300 terms with an average cost per click of €0.12. In the two weeks he tested it, he generated 20,000 clicks, saving him around €4,800 per month.
SEOmonitor helps zero SEO performance
As we’ve seen from Smith and the Estudio34 team, taking an integrated approach to SEO and PPC can help data-driven experimentation and potentially reduce waste in both channels in the following ways: I have.
- Understand the consequences of keyword duplication and cannibalism.
- Learn what works best for each channel and optimize other channels (specific terms, landing pages, meta descriptions, etc.).
- Be aware of when and how to use specific tactics.
SEOmonitor’s data granularity (desktop and mobile daily ranks as standard) and no solution offered allowed the agency to focus on SEO performance and understand all the changes.
Plus, with advanced filtering capabilities, groups could be combined and tracked discreetly.
This is just one of the many ways SEO professionals can leverage SEOmonitor to make their workflows more effective.
Join us or an agency like Estudio34 to help SEO professionals focus on what matters.
