Clicks Versus Search: 5 Lessons Learned in the War Over Marketing Budget

The perennial conflict between paid ads and earned media is perhaps more stark than ever—but pay-per-click and SEO don’t have to always be at each other’s throats for a bigger cut of the marketing budget. In fact, they work extremely well together: The strategies and strengths of PPC and SEO can work in tandem, reinforcing their disparate values that ultimately lead to conversions and engagement.

In the spirit of world peace—and as the dust on the latest Google algorithm update has settled a bit for brands and platforms—here are a few ways you can use them together to mitigate each channel’s limitations and get the maximum benefit from each.

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Improve Quality Score

What’s Quality Score? According to Google, it’s a rating of the overall user experience your ads and landing pages provide when users search for you.

Basically, it is used as an indication of whether your ads and landing pages are useful to your consumers. The score is on a 1-10 scale and has three components:

1. Expected clickthrough rate: Will a user click your ad?
2. Ad relevance: Does the ad make sense for the query?
3. Landing page experience: Does the content here match the ad’s offer?

The supreme art of [budget] war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

―Sun Tzu, SEO/PPC war veteran

While Quality Score is a diagnostic tool intended to give you an idea of how your PPC ads stack up against those of other advertisers, the three Quality Score performance metrics overlap with issues that are addressed and tracked with SEO initiatives. By having PPC and SEO work together, you can make more efficient ad spending and better SEO.

Share keywords and search volumes

If you optimize landing pages for search and PPC, your Quality Score will likely go up.

Additionally, SEO keyword research can be repurposed for PPC keyword targeting and retargeting. There’s no need to be wasteful and do separate keyword research if it can be recycled.

During your SEO keyword research, you will find target keywords, search queries and the associated search volumes, which can provide a blueprint for PPC. Much of this can be sourced from tools SEO frequently requires, like GSC queries, and you can also discover insights via Google AdWords’ Keyword Planner on the PPC side.

[Data insights and] opportunities multiply as they are seized.

―General Carl von Clausewitz, plagiarizing Sun Tzu

Any search term clusters found on either end can also be grouped when you create your ad groups in Google Ads—this will also help improve your Quality Score.

Additionally, you can collect data from ads to improve your SEO strategy. Google Merchant Center can be a treasure trove of useful information—especially for multilocation retailers.

As a best practice for communication, it’s best to set up an automatic reporting schedule so all digital channels are talking to each other about changes and taking advantage of data insights.

Share conversion rate data

SEO and PPC can also gain a lot by sharing conversion rate data, specifically, with respect to conversion rates per keyword, page template or funnel stage.

By looking at SEO landing page conversion rates, you can refine your PPC strategy to know what’s connecting with your target audience. This goes both ways: PPC conversions by keyword is a great signal to help choose keywords and topics to target for SEO.

A wise general tasks [SEO] to help [optimize and share keyword conversion rates].

—Alexander the Great, CMO of Macedonia

Also, don’t underestimate SEO as a force for optimizing your conversion rates. Quite often, you can target more efficiently with properly optimized content to match user intent as opposed to just relying on the visibility that is ostensibly ensured via PPC.

Landing page conversion optimization

You can also get a higher Quality Score by optimizing your ads and landing pages to improve your expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance and landing page experience.

Again, this is where good SEO research and optimization will kill two birds with one stone. To optimize your landing pages, it is likely you will want to look at elements such as:

• H1 and title tags.
• Meta description.
• Product description copy and webpage copy.
• Images and videos.
• Page loading time.

SEO can assist with landing page optimization and provide useful information about optimizing the pages and conversion rates.

The secret of war lies in the communications [between SEO and PPC].”

—Napoleon on landing page optimization

Also, regular communication between the SEO and PPC channels is necessary to avoid potential pitfalls. For example, if you are redirecting pages, communicate them to give PPC enough time to adjust the ads so you’re not wasting money sending users to a broken page.

Pooling development budgets

By allying SEO and PPC development budgets, you can get things done more quickly and efficiently. There’s no reason why PPC and SEO should be fighting over budget when there’s so much crossover.

There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.

—Winston Churchill, sober-ish, on Q4 1944 budgeting

So, instead of trying to convince stakeholders that your channel’s priorities are better than the other channel’s, see which site implementations can service both. Pooling the budgets will allow you to have more flexibility in what you can achieve and will have a magnified impact on the organization when projects can be synergized.

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The bottom line

There’s no reason for SEO and PPC to be in a state of war and tension for their organization’s marketing budget. There’s plenty of overlapping priorities and methods of collaboration that will service both the channels and the organization better when they play nice.