Can SEO and PPC Work Together? – In Search SEO Podcast

[This is a general summary of the interview and not a word for word transcript. You can listen to the podcast for the full interview.]



Mordy: Welcome to another In Search SEO Podcast interview session. Today, for your listening pleasure, we have a self-described SEO/SEM philosopher, an industry speaker, a Search Engine Journal author… A big welcome to Hennessey Digital’s own Navah Hopkins!

Welcome!

Navah: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to talk about a topic near and dear to my heart: SEO & PPC integrating together instead of fighting like dogs and cats.

M: Okay, no more fighting then. First off, you’re from Boston, right?

N: I lived in Boston. I actually lived in Florida, Connecticut, and I currently live in Rhode Island.

M: I **** Rhode Island. I had my honeymoon in Newport.

Now, we could get into Boston and all of its sports teams which I loathe… but more importantly than that, you at one point ran a non-profit education program and as a former Teach For America alumn, that really interested me. Could you just speak about it for a quick second?

N: Angel Ed was instead of me getting a Masters I started a non-profit and learned all of the things of what could have gone better and also what not to do. What was really interesting about Angel Ed was its mission which I am very passionate about which is connecting students to mentors and scholarships. In the early days, I made some key mistakes, specifically, I did not build the right team to support the initiative. A lot of it ended being on me and that wasn’t a reasonable scalable way to grow. I also made the biggest mistake any non-profit can make and whoever’s listening who wants to start a non-profit please take this to heart. Starting off as a non-profit unless you have big pockets to wade through the 501(c)(3) process and the fact that you can’t make money in those initial days is going to be really tough. We started off as a 501(c)(3) and we couldn’t earn while we were waiting for that 501(c)(3) certification.

I learned how not to run a business by trying to do something good. While I was running the non-profit I was also doing SEO/PPC freelance and while doing both I couldn’t focus nearly as much on the business. However, it did create, in my current role, relationships with professors and working with schools trying to make PPC and SEO as an employable skill that you actually don’t need to go to college to learn, but can just teach yourself and as a trade grow your business. As much as it was lessons in failure and failure turning into opportunities I am truly grateful to all the things I learned and the people I met and the ability to give back in my role today to the next generation of practitioners.

M: That’s amazing. As a former teacher, I really appreciate your non-profit.

So let’s get into this. Today, we’re talking about myths and how SEO and PPC merge and meld together. There’s this common fallacy out there that SEO is totally separate from PPC. For the listeners who are new to this problem, can you please outline some of the current falsehoods of SEO and PPC together?

N: So my favorite myth is that PPC is what you do when you need results fast and you just want to throw “dumb money” at the problem and SEO is a long term strategy with extensive growth. The truth is both SEO and PPC will do nothing for you if you do not have an honest sense of how much you make per customer, how many new customers can you support, and what are the operational supports in place to really grow and scale.

PPC without guidance and data insights into how the business can grow and scale is going to be just “dumb money” and SEO without a focus of why we’re doing what we’re doing, what pages we’re focusing on, etc. is going to be just “dumb effort.” So one of the big myths we should all dispel is that PPC is the easy button that you press for profit.

The other myth that I get very testy about is that PPCs are after all the budget. We’re actually not. There are two kinds of budgets. There’s the budget that you invest in placements and there’s the budget that you invest in resource and development. PPCs, at the end of the day, are not going to encourage a client to pursue a particular channel if it’s not going to be profitable for them.

For example, if you know that you do not have at least $750 per month in ad spend, you likely are not going to start with Google search. You’re likely going to explore Display ads, video ads, or Facebook, and Instagram ads. If you have hundreds of thousands of dollars each month you still aren’t going to have that same critical approach. It just means you now have larger budgets which you can scale to more products. For example, when we think about e-commerce versus local versus any of the different verticals, you will need to think of the budgets that will resonate with each channel.

I think one of the myths is that PPC is just the paid channel as opposed to what it really is where you have Google search, who is the salesperson whose job is to take the order. You have Facebook, Instagram, etc. who are the community managers that can sometimes be impulse enablers. You have video and display that can be educational, increase brand awareness, and dispel myths. They all work together and if you don’t work together by leveraging channels as they’re meant to be leveraged, then you’re just throwing dollars at the wall and seeing what sticks.

The same can be said with SEO. You can optimize to be the first position for a particular query, but if that query has zero value for the business, no one cares if you rank for it. Or if you institute pagination that does not actually put your best products at the front, we’re all going to be really, really sad. It’s really about taking a step back and not just acting because you feel like you have to. Take that step back and consider why you’re doing what you’re doing, why you’re leveraging what you’re leveraging, and then move forward.

M: It’s a funny thing because with PPC you see the money going out and it’s very clear what you spent and how expensive it is, but SEO isn’t cheap either particularly on the content side. Creating content is very expensive. You’re not going to find someone who will write a blog post for you for $10. I believe content is way more expensive than PPC ads.

N: What’s interesting is the mechanics of why PPC can be expensive or not expensive comes down to two things. The first is how you structure out your account. I like to put it to clients where there’s either a “volume play” where you know by the nature of your business your conversion rates (or your profitable actions) are so low that you have to hit the volume button. Meaning, you’re willing to eat an elevated cost per acquisition (or how much it costs to acquire a customer) i.e., you’re willing to eat the amount of time it takes to do negative work to block those bad queries because you know you need the volume.

There’s another side to it of what I like to call the “value play” where you’re okay getting less volume because you know your conversion rates are that much better. You know you’re okay with getting fewer leads because those leads are worth so much money that you’re fine going away from the volume play.

A lot of the reasons why you’ll find that paid is expensive is not actually because it’s expensive, but because you’ve set yourself up to do volume, but you were trying to do value, or because of the mechanics of match types, or how keywords function now, or you are in a particular market that’s really expensive and you opted into auction prices that will make it an expensive proposition for you to get volume.

The other thing that’s really important is a paid metric that I would encourage all SEOs to ask their PPC teams about which is called impression share. Impression share is, of all available impressions, how many impressions we are actually getting. You can lose impression share either due to budget or rank. What’s really interesting is that, based off of Wordstream data, across the US and Canada the average impression share is about 47.8%, but the majority of advertisers are not actually losing it due to budget, they’re losing it to rank. So structural issues are causing us to miss out on these opportunities and wasted spend only happens if we haven’t set ourselves up to get enough leads in our day to achieve profit. So if our impression share isn’t let’s say 75% or better, the **** are we could be doing better. A 10% conversion rate on a non-branded Google Search campaign is actually really good. So if we can’t get at least 10 clicks in our day, we’re not going to necessarily see the value because we can’t by the numbers get enough leads to yield a customer. It’s those little metric ratios that I find to be really helpful.

Are you a gamer at all? Do you play board games?

M: Board games or video games?

N: Either.

M: Board games, yes. I have four children.

N: One of the things I actually like to do with anyone new to the industry is to have them play a bunch of board games to get their minds in a state where they can process what it feels like to work in a paid account. Board games work as great practice because while a lot of board games have a set of core rules, the basic mechanics of the paths to victory adapt based on each board game. Your ability to bounce from channel to channel, your ability to leverage the resources that you have and allocate them where they’ll do best. Board games, particularly worker placement games, are actually a very powerful path to get your mind trained to think about how paid, and in some cases even organic, works. So shout out to playing board games to get yourself in the mindset to manage counts.

M: So does Guess Who count as a board game for this?

N: It actually does. It’s audience segmentation. You’re excluding personas that don’t quite fit what you’re looking to do. It’s actually funny, I use the picture of the Guess Who board whenever I’m talking about audience segmentation. For example, if I ask “Does your person have white hair?” and then I find out they don’t I can then exclude people with white hair.

In PPC, regardless of whether it’s Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, whatever, the same way you can target audiences that you care about and that you want to put your message towards you also can exclude folks that don’t quite fit. For example, if you’re in real estate, there’s a very big difference in intent, in auction prices, and in value between commercial and residential. Someone who does commercial deals will want nothing to do with residential and someone who does residential is not going to want to get dragged to the auction prices of commercial. So you can actually exclude those folks based on actual audiences that Google is kind enough to give us.

M: It’s funny because when it comes to SEO when we talk about targeting, we do a very terrible job at it. We’ll still go for that high volume keyword that doesn’t really fit into exactly what we’re doing. But I feel that we’re getting closer together on this. Whereas now, since the advent of Google becoming much more holistic with how it analyzes websites, you have to start thinking about what am I going to write on my site, what’s the identity of my site, and if I’m going to write about something that doesn’t align with what my identity is, how is Google going to interpret that? This, in turn, forces you to target a certain audience because you’re going to write about a certain topic, you’re going to target a certain demographic, and target a certain type of reader or purchaser because you’re going to stick to your core.

Do you think because of the way machine learning is now on the SEO side that we’re starting to get just a little bit more into a general marketing mindset that aligns way more to PPC?

N: Yes, but part of the reason that we’re on that path is that at the end of the day it is not profitable for us to be everything to everyone. We have to choose who our people are going to be and serve them really well as opposed to trying to be generalists. eBay is my favorite advertiser doing dumb money because they’ll show up in queries in the SERP that have zero value for them to be there. They’re just throwing money at the wall. And the thing is because they’re doing that volume playing and they have the budget to do it, there is some value proposition there. But when you’re not eBay and you don’t have the budget for that, whether it’s for paid or organic, you really have to be mindful of who are your best people, where are they, what are their interests, what will motivate them, and how do you cultivate their desire?

I was actually having a conversation with a couple of folks at TechSEO Boost. It was really interesting for me to hear what kinds of things those of us working in paid have been focusing on for the past couple of years when in the past it was things like audience segmentation and message mapping. Now, we’re moving more towards intent and how to speak to the pain points of our customers.

In terms of how we come together, it’s really about sharing what are the pockets of our customers that are best served by paid and what are the pockets of our customers that are best served by organic. There are transactional terms that do not happen nearly enough for paid to actively target. It makes zero sense to deprive our organic counterparts of that intel saying for example, “This 15-word query converted greatly, but I cannot actively target it because Google will never ever give it enough room because low search volume terms tend to not get as much budget.” Why don’t you write a post about it? Or why don’t we consider reworking our description to honor the fact that this was a super valuable customer? Or maybe there’s a statistically significant sample size of themes in those low search volume queries that you can then give to your organic team.

You want to be respectful of the fact that Google doesn’t even treat all queries the same across devices. Research-oriented queries where there is no ad at the top can sometimes be full of ads on mobile devices whereas desktop is more research-oriented. There are times where it’s a super transactional query across everything. And when I say transactional, that means it’s at least three ads or the full four pack up at the top. If it’s an e-commerce query, you have the shopping ads and if it’s a local query, you likely have Local Service Ads plus text ads, plus the little local search ads in the map pack.

You had a question for me ahead of time about local and commerce. The biggest place for synergy, and this is the checkbox that every business has to make sure they check, is claiming their local listings and really taking advantage of all the resources within Google My Business. The same thing for Bing’s equivalent Microsoft business profile. You actually can have ad spots that you could just get based off of that Google My Business listing being attached. And with that, you get that many more user insights.

So in paid we have segments of user interactions. It can be really interesting to see the interactions of what groups of people or what audiences lead to the site. Someone who wanted to come visit us versus someone who engaged with the sitelink because that happened to be a more interesting idea for them. Google My Business, the location extensions, and making sure that you’ve claimed that local presence is such a crucial step for organic but it’s also a really crucial step for paid.

M: There have been so many interesting places where ads show up locally. There are ads now in Local Packs and even ads in local Knowledge Panels for competitive businesses. Google Maps has always had local ads in there. A Local Pack is very much an SEO space but paid creeps its way in there within the local arena.

N: What’s interesting is I’ve seen Local Packs with a paid spot and an organic spot, but then you have boring horrible text ads for the same business. What I worry about is that people are just hitting default buttons and checking boxes as opposed to being mindful.

M: Does Google giving ads a more organic look help create a deeper bond between SEO and PPC?

N: What’s interesting is that people have exact control in ads over headline one and headline two. Headline three doesn’t always show as it’s more of a desktop spot. What’s interesting is I’ve actually seen SERPs where the same business had super compelling and amazing content in their ad, but their organic titles were gross. It was complete and utter redundancy. This is silly. You’re putting all this effort into your headlines where you’re going to pay for the engagement, but you’re not making sure that your organic listing is just as compelling.

This is like one of those opportunities where instead of fighting with each other and saying, “Paid, why are you stealing my budget?” you can say, “Hey, paid, you’re getting very clear data on what messaging is working. Can you please share that with us?” And vice versa. If you happen to see organically that certain messaging is really crucial there’s no reason for paid to go in blind on a test if there are insights that show it’s working.

The other thing to be mindful of is that when you’re looking at an ad, you have the URL paths, you have your headlines, and you have your descriptions. There used to be this thing where you had to title case every letter, but with expanded text ads that went away. What I actually advise a lot of clients to do is to make the paths lowercase to mirror organic listings. But when it comes to headlines and descriptions, that’s where there is no rule.

In terms of ads mirroring organic, sure they mirror on search and kind of on other channels as well whether it comes to Facebook posts and Facebook spots, whether it comes to a YouTube video ad versus YouTube content. We can talk about whether or not you should invest in making exciting, engaging, and creative content. But in terms of the actual content, that’s where there’s an opportunity to collaborate.

M: Content is the natural unifier. For example, a unique landing page that’s unindexed that goes straight to the ad that’s fine, but more often than not, you can use the same landing page for organic search and you can tie it to an ad. I’m assuming that a quality landing page organically is going to be a quality page for ads.

N: This is one of those, “it depends” moments.

When it comes to landing pages, I actually prefer having dedicated landing pages on either a subdomain and not a microsite. The reason for it is very simple. Google has a rule that you cannot have more than one domain in the same ad group and you cannot have redirects. Organically, you may intelligently make a move to redirect your domain to have that power be there, but if you’re not talking with your team and letting them know you could actually kill all their volume because redirects happen.

The other thing to think about is that a quality score is part of how you get good ad rank. A quality score of five or greater you get a discount, a quality score of 4 or lower you pay a premium. There are three main quality score mechanics: clickthrough rate (CTR), ad relevance, and the landing page experience. One of the worst ways a landing page experience gets hit is because the ad bot crawler gets blocked by the organic team.

There’s zero reason for the paid team to get in the way of the organic team and force what they need on organic. Instead, you should share the landing pages. But in some cases, it actually can be super valuable to have those dedicated landing pages because we’re far more focused on getting the user to act because we paid money to get them there to convert, not to read. For example, we hate walls of text. We want big, bold, contact numbers. We want fill-in forms above the fold. Maybe there’s a video and maybe there isn’t. If you’re going to have navigation it depends some ads do great with navigation and some don’t.

I actually prefer keeping dedicated landing pages over having landing pages for organic because if you try to boost organic rankings just by driving a whole bunch of traffic, you might get some gains, but ultimately it’s not sustainable because it’s artificially inflating as opposed to truly building a good user experience that Google will then continually reward you for.

M: That’s sort of my problem with all of this. I understand that there’s a lot of room for synergy between SEO and PPC, but to actually implement this with two different teams, how is it possible?

N: I have a cheat button for you. Dynamic search ads (DSA). It is one of the easiest ways for organic to get a sense of paid and to add paid on to their offering without having to necessarily know a bunch. The basic premise of dynamic search ads is that Google will crawl your site and serve up the landing page that best matches the user’s query. You do not write the headlines rather you write the description and you can exclude pages like the blog or the homepage that you don’t want to actually pay to send people to. You can make sure what the landing page might be and what the query might be. The value of that is you’re basically paying for data to see what queries are actually worth targeting based on how they searched and then know what to build from there.

The one downside of DSA is once a campaign is made DSA it’s a DSA campaign forever. DSA campaigns are also eligible to take traffic from campaigns where you’re actually bidding on keywords. So if you’re going to run DSA, you want to make sure that you make all of your active and negative keywords in the DSA campaign, particularly your branded terms or any major competitor terms that you might have campaigns running for, as well all the keywords that you’re targeting, and making sure that you’re excluding the homepage, about us pages, blog pages, or anything that’s not actually part of the path to conversion.

M: And the budget?

N: Regarding budgets and bidding, you can forecast it with some test budgets. There are a bunch of resources out there to help. One thing worth bearing in mind with DSA is if you’re going to do DSA and you don’t necessarily trust your conversions, I actually like doing DSA on a maximize click bid strategy with a bid cap that is 10%. So say I set a daily budget of $50 a day, I would want no click in there that would exceed $5. Now, Google will average out your daily spend budget across 30.4 days. So in order to do that, it can up to double your spending on any given day to average across 30.4. So a very common mistake that people will make is when they set a budget of $4,000 a day and then they cry when Google spends $8,000 a day because that’s what you told Google that you were fine doing.

M: I remember that being a problem when it came out. Is that still a major issue?

N: It’s not really a major issue for people that take the time to audit the keywords and auction prices and who are truly honest with themselves about what they’re spending in their daily budget. A very common mistake people will make is that they’ll adjust bids without adjusting the budget and then complain when they’re still spending a bunch and they don’t understand why. And vice versa, if you set a daily budget of say $5 and your keywords are $3 I’m not expecting anything to happen because at most you can fit one click in your day.

M: That’s good to know. Conflict of interest aside, do you recommend people do PPC in-house or has it gotten to the point where even with DSA it’s just not worth it?

N: It truly does depend. This is actually one of the reasons why I loved working for Wordstream. We were able to empower small to medium-sized businesses to really own those tasks. It does take a little bit of time to learn and you can definitely explore tools to help you. To be fair, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft put in a lot of effort to make sure that their native platforms are far more intuitive than they used to be.

The basic mechanics to remember when you’re thinking about paid is knowing who are your people, who are you targeting, and how much are you really comfortable spending to acquire those leads while being honest with yourself about how much those leads are worth. In terms of the structure of the account, do you have the time to go in and audit or do you need to set yourself up with less nitty-gritty manual work?

Agencies are great and in-house is great. You just have to be honest with yourself about how much time you truly have to dedicate to management and if that time correlates with what you’ll be held accountable for.

M: You mentioned before there are cases where people say SEO is about building authority and PPC is about getting a quick win. And yes, it doesn’t really work that way, which makes sense, but are there cases where it does make sense? Where does it make sense to do SEO and not PPC or vice versa?

N: One of the biggest reasons I hate this question is that it implies that you have to choose one. A healthy business, once they’ve gotten to a place where they’re stable, will be doing both and they’ll prioritize based on the margins they make on their products to focus on PPC because they’ll make enough money that It will make sense for them to advertise. If they don’t necessarily make enough money to justify investing and in acquiring those leads, then they have to look more organically. But the other thing to consider is that a lot of folks think about PPC and SEO as just search and it really ignores where the future of PPC is going. PPC is far more focused on video, far more focused on these new emerging channels like Snap, TikTok, Local Waze, and LinkedIn for B2B.

We want to be mindful that your business has products and services and only you looking at your products and services will know if it’s profitable to advertise or if it’s profitable to focus more on content, events, or PR as they’re all going to end up working together. The big takeaway, though, is that intelligence needs to be shared with everyone. There is no good reason for the paid team to be holding on to all of the low search volume queries and not sharing them. There is no good reason for the organic team to not be sharing the core message that they found which really worked for them.

If there’s one takeaway that people can take from this is that if you want to be honest with yourself about what your needs are and you want to make sure that there are pipelines of communication between every channel and not just the marketing team, but also the customer success team, the sales team, and what quality of leads are actually exciting for them to talk to, who are the customers that are staying the longest and spending the most.

One of the greatest crimes is that there is no cross-communication of attribution between paid and organic and the best in-house teams and the best agencies that have both paid and organic share those attributes in conversations and they don’t just rely on last-click.

M: Can you please explain to the audience why you should not rely on last-click?

N: Last click attribution is the default attribution for Google and for many other platforms. What it does is it will only give credit to the last click before the conversion happened. The problem with that is everyone has a part to play and it’s not really fair to only give credit to the last person who touched the ball before the touchdown when the whole team was playing. So if you have tons of data then data-driven attribution is awesome and wonderful. The problem is the thresholds for those are really high so if you don’t have those sorts of thresholds you should definitely consider position-based attribution which will give 40% to the first click and 40% to the last click and then share the final 20% to all other clicks. You may also want to consider time decay where the further away from the click it is the less credit it gets. But yeah, last-click attribution is really not fair to any department.

Lastly, shameless plug for Amy Bishop as we’re doing a webinar with her about audience mapping and intelligent message mapping and she has won some of the most brilliant perspectives on audience segmentation and leveraging analytics. It’s absolutely a myth that PPC does not use analytics. We 100% do. The unfortunate thing is that we often don’t share our perspectives on analytics, but there is the ability to track back the page flow and drop off and see that impact.

Optimize It or Disavow It



M: If you could only have one… would you prefer to have your site appear on the SERP as the top placed ad or as the 5th organic result?

N: It depends. If you’re running a branded campaign or a competitor campaign I would take the first spot every day of the week because in branded campaigns, not only do you want to own your SERP and control your messaging you want to direct people exactly to where they can do the most good. And for competitor campaigns, I will 100% **** to snipe people’s customers and put myself in the spot where I could potentially encourage them to consider me instead.

But for any other paid spot I actually prefer positions 2-3. The reason for that is that compared to the benefit of being on position one, unless you’re on a mobile device, you actually get a lot of the same extensions and the price difference is a real boon so you’re able to get many more clicks in your day.

So unless it’s branded or competitor, I would take the fifth spot organically because like I hate paying a premium for something where I could anyways get into positions two to three.

M: I always wondered about this. I tend to notice that I’ll skip the first ad and look at the 2nd or 3rd ad. So let’s say you have two or three ads on top, would you target that last ad above the organic?

N: My preference is to be position 2-3. The main reason that you take the first position is that you want access to every single extension, you’re taking full advantage of all the extensions, and you’re leveraging them intelligently. So unless you’re doing that, and it’s not a brand new campaign or a competitor campaign, it makes zero sense.

One funny thing to know is that Google actually bought an ad on their server for Google Ads and then Wordstream got the second ad spot.

M: That’s awesome. Navah. Thanks, I really appreciate you coming on.

N: Thank you. I really appreciate you having me and I hope that I provided some insights into the PPC world and why we want to work together and win together and not take all the money because we don’t. We are genuinely excited to work with everybody.