Although not many people seem to realise it, Adwords can actually be a search engine optimisation tool as well as a paid traffic generator. In addition to bringing in traffic from your PPC advertisements, it can help you with your organic rankings too.
In this article, we take a look at a few of the ways that your Adwords can help with your search engine optimisation.
Choosing Your Keywords
Before you can start implementing a search engine optimisation strategy, you need to know what keywords you should be targeting. There are a lot of tools online that help you to research your keywords, but it’s unfortunate that we can never be completely sure of how accurate they are.
You can use your Adwords account to help you test the keywords that you think are important for your site, and get data that’s usually much more accurate.
Improve Your Search Engine Results Click Through Rate
It’s generally accepted by the SEO community that Google probably uses organic click through rate data to help them judge the extent to which a keyword is relevant to an organic listing. Using a similar line of thought, it should be possible to figure out what page title and description you should use for related web pages.
We suggest taking the headline of your best performing Adwords ad, and using that as the title of your page. You can take the description from the best ad, and use it as your meta description. Not only do you know (from your Adwords data) that the title and description perform well, but it should also help by providing great anchor text for inbound links, as people will often use the title of the page when they link to you.
Optimising Your Landing Page
The website optimiser provided by Google can help you test and optimise your landing pages fairly quickly. Using the data it provides, you can create landing pages that are highly optimised for your type of conversion, making it easier to convert organic visitors.
You can also create separate persona’s that you can map to sets of keywords, allowing you to effectively structure the components of an SEO strategy.
Target Keywords Geographically
Thanks to the geographic performance report, you can get some useful geographic data from Adwords. This can help you to optimise pages specifically for certain locations, and to determine whether it’s necessary to do so in the first place.
It can also be useful if you’re running a local business campaign, by letting you know which areas to target.
Content Network Link Research
Because the Google Content Network has such a wide reach, (estimated to be something like 80% of all online users), it can be a valuable source of ideas for getting good inbound links. With the Placement Performance Reports, you can get a good idea of exactly where you’re converting people from your advertisements.
With that information, it might be possible to make a direct deal with the website. Perhaps you can write content for them in exchange for a link for example. Getting a relevant link that also sends you conversions is great.
Content Network Content Research
Using the data that we mentioned in the previous paragraph, you can also take a look at the URL’s and write some content that is relevant to, (and preferably better than) the content of the sites or pages that you’re getting conversions from.
If those pages were found organically, and you can not only improve upon the content, but provide the solution that brought people to your site in the first place, you”ll have great relevant content that should attract natural links.
Other Ways Adwords Can Be Useful
There are a few other ideas for taking advantage of the information you can gather through Adwords. They’re not strictly related to search engine optimisation, but they can be useful nonetheless.
Testing Creatives
Planning a big media buy? Wondering which creatives will get the best response? Use display ads to test which images, video clips or flash designs get the best click through rate, and the best conversion. This lets you choose the right creative element before you make your media buy.
Demographic Targeting
Use the Demographic Performance Report to get a general idea of the age, sex and country demographics that are converting on your site, as well as the creative elements that are most appealing to your converting demographic. This information can help you in a lot of other places, such as advertising on Facebook.
Link Exposure
Adwords can give you quick exposure for your content, product or service. Although this isn’t organic ranking, increasing exposure will improve your chances for links, which will have an organic effect.
Improving Conversion Rates
Getting your search advertising, and your display advertising, to work together can have a positive impact on conversion rates. According to research released by Microsoft, users who view three or more impressions, in combination with at least one search click, have an increased chance of converting.
With Thanks For The Inspiration
We’d like to thank Dave Davis, of Redfly Marketing, for his post How Google Ads Can Be The Best SEO Tool In Your Arsenal which gave us the ideas that form the basis this article.