AdWords & SEO: The Match Made in Heaven

AdWords and similar PPC programs are very different from organic search engine optimization efforts on the face – AdWords is, after all,effectively paying to beat more relevant organic results and get clicks that would never have otherwise seen your website. Despite this, on-site improvements that will aid SEO will also have the benefit of lowering costs for your AdWords accounts and vice versa. Here are a couple of ways that you can save money and drive more organic traffic to your website.

Improve your landing pages

Specificity is the name of the game when it comes to AdWords. Improving your landing pages and drilling down the specificity of your ad groups are two of the easiest ways to save money and increase your CTR (click-through-rate). Ensure that all of your landing pages have proper calls to action and that the content really matches the keystring or search query used to get to the page. Bounce/exit rates will help you drill down on your worst pages so you can optimize those.

Keywords, titles, content

The story is almost exactly the same here for both SEO & AdWords: optimize your content, titles, and keywords to put out the right quality signals. Make sure your page titles are all unique, that you have a meta description on every page, that you’re using heading and bold tags to emphasize important content and that you are placing keywords into your content effectively.

Focus on retention

Google tracks bounce rate for both organic results and paid results, so it pays to be running A/B tests on your content and optimizing your landing pages as much as possible. Make sure that you have appropriate calls-to-action and that the content on each major landing page best represents the search query or AdWords keystring. The best way to track this is to look through your Analytics, carefully analyzing the bounce and exit rates for specific pages and search queries as well as for the keystrings. Then, look at your in-page analytics and see what your visitors are clicking on the most; this will give you the best idea of what your visitors are really interested in and help you deliver it to them front and foremost.

Consistent Time and Effort

Virtually every efficiency study conducted on both SEO and PPC efforts indicate that consistent time is the most effective tool to decreasing costs and increasing conversion. Spending at least an half hour a week on both fronts will help you to better identify your opportunities and plug holes before they become bigger issues. It’s not a lot of time and it will save you dramatic amounts of money over the long term.