The juggle between SEO and PPC is a tough one to master. New business owners will often find themselves torn between the two, not sure if they should invest their time into Search Engine Optimization or invest the money into Pay-per-click. Oftentimes, small business owners will invest too much capital into their PPC ventures. In an article by Search Engine Land, they discuss the importance of “not allowing your PPC to cannibalize your SEO efforts”. I thought that the article was very interesting, so I decided to write a summary about the article here.
There are some telltale signs that this article talks about that show that PPC may be countering your SEO efforts. The first sign is declining organic click through rates. This means that people are not coming across your page organically, but rather through your PPC efforts. Another sign is increased PPC clicks, but without any real traffic growth. This means that PPC ads may be taking away organic clicks from search engine results, which means you need to invest less money into PPC and allow your SEO to do its job. We are given three key steps to help avoid these things and allow your SEO to reach its full potential.
- Check overlap between SEO and PPC keywords- Remove any organic words where you rank below the fold. You want to allow your PPC to do the work there, since most of the time, searchers won’t scroll below the fold to find results.
- Use negative keywords- Use negative keywords in your PPC campaigns to prevent them from triggering your ads. This both saves you money, and allows your SEO to do its job
- Refine your bids- Make sure you’re only bidding on keywords you absolutely need. Bidding on words that would show up in your standard SEO is a waste of money and time. Just make sure you’re optimizing all your tools to the fullest extent.
Those are just some of the key things I read about when it comes to PPC cannibalizing SEO. I thought they were very interesting, and I may end up using these someday in the workforce.
One Response
This is very insightful! I had never really given it a thought that PPC keywords could be hindering your SEO keywords but it totally makes sense that the overlap could be detrimental.