Both PPC ads and organic results share the same real estate (the SERP), and digital marketers should not consider them as different from one another. Read through to learn about top strategies to make PPC and SEO work together.
Is bidding on brand keywords necessary?
The short answer is yes. However most of the time advertisers have a hard time justifying bidding on brand keywords because of the following concerns:
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Why would you bid on your brand keywords when you already are ranking in the absolute top position?
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Searches for your brand keywords have the highest intention of finding your website in the SERP and will most likely end up visiting your website, why would you pay for that traffic?
Both are valid questions but instead you should consider your reach and the threat put out by the competition.
Even if you are ranking in the absolute top position, the PPC ads are always going to be positioned higher than that in SERP, which will distract your most valuable prospects (as they are aware of and are looking for your brand) if you are not there. You should own the top ad space for your brand searches to defend the fort.
Digital ads are part of our lives and users are now used to seeing ads in top search results, in fact not seeing your brand at the top position of the SERP might even damage your credibility in the eyes of the customer.
Let's think about a scenario where your target audience searched for your brand followed by a generic term, which might look something like this "myBrand skincare". What will most probably happen is that other advertisers bidding on the keyword "skincare" will match that query, and the winning ads will be listed on top of your organic absolute top position. This is a significant threat and should not be disregarded.
A more aggressive and a common case would be your direct competitors bidding on your brand keywords with a highly targeted ad copy and an irresistible offer. Even though your audience initially searched for you, they might become curious to find out about your competitors offer and end up on their website rather than their initial intention.
You should always bid on your brand keywords to make sure your hard earned brand-aware prospects are coming back to your website.
Bidding on low-ranking keywords
Especially in the e-commerce space product and category related keywords have relatively high search volume and the competition is tough. The big players will dominate the SERP and it can take months to rank in the first page even with a very well executed SEO strategy.
On the other hand the reality is you will only have a certain advertising budget to spend on PPC, and one way to determine how much support your top keywords need is to actually by making sense of the organic ranks and traffic coming from those keywords.
This will help you understand where you definitely need traffic from PPC ads and where you can tolerate spending a little less given you already have some organic traffic.
A/B testing headlines and descriptions with PPC
One way to leverage the flexibility that PPC advertising offers is A/B testing how a certain ad copy works and then using the copy as your meta title and description to be listed in organic results.
While running this test the key metric to look at would be your CTR and ad relevance to search terms. An ad that has received a significant amount of clicks with higher CTR will indicate that users find the copy more relevant to their search query. At that point go ahead and apply the changes to your meta fields to boost your organic CTRs as well.
Dominate the SERP
There are multiple ways to be listed in the SERP either through shopping results, structured snippets, PPC ads at the top of the page and last but not least the organic results.
The more positions you dominate in the SERP the more recognition and reach you will get and the chances of getting a click to your website will be multiplied. For this reason it is still a very good idea to bid on your top keywords even though you may be ranking at the top and getting a decent amount of organic traffic.
Make sure your product catalog for shopping ads is also optimised for this, the best way to do this is to use your top keywords in product titles and descriptions.
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