In many organisations today you’ll see paid search (PPC) and search engine optimisation (SEO) handled as though they were entirely independent entities, either with one managed internally and the other outsourced, both outsourced to different agencies, or some combination of that scenario. The problem with this logic is that they’re simply not independent.

Sure, they’re very different ways of generating search traffic. After all, SEO work takes months to deliver results whereas a well healed PPC program can be ramped up or down with immediate effect on traffic volumes. And that really is the distinguishing factor. The programs may well be managed differently and use different skill sets to deliver, but they’re working with largely the same keywords in the same market space.

Sharing Keyword Analysis & Challenging Assumptions

You’re running one business and that business has a market that can be reached with a range of keywords. The size of that keyword list will vary depending on your type of business but when you look at it from the business perspective, there is only ever one list.

On that list will be keywords covering a diverse range of options and each discipline will be thinking differently about how the keyword could be used. To illustrate the point let’s take an example and drag out an old favourite, “blue widget”.

Our PPC expert will be looking at our blue widget and asking themselves these questions:

• How much search volume is available?
• What price would I have to pay to get placement on that term?
• How well will that term convert?
• Is this a profitable option?

Our SEO expert will be looking at our blue widget and asking themselves these questions:

• How much search volume is available?
• How many other web sites are targeting this term?
• How well will that term convert?
• How much effort (cost) would be involved in maintaining a placement on this term?
• Is this a profitable option?

So we can already see there is a great deal of similarity in the lines of thinking. Unfortunately both our experts here have missed a trick because they should both also be asking:

• What’s the best approach for this Keyword in our overall campaign?

Only by sharing our independent findings from both PPC and SEO can we work out an effective strategy for how to go to market on the “blue widget” keyword.

In our example it could well be that as a business we can’t afford to compete for “blue widget” in our PPC campaign, but that it is sustainable for our SEO program. This immediately adds priority to the term in our SEO program as it becomes the only sustainable long term solution.

So our strategy might be to support a low profit PPC campaign while our SEO is in place, and then fall back in PPC, choosing to intervene only if our SEO position falls below a certain point, or when we need to push more revenue as a short term solution.

Using PPC as a Testing Ground

We all know that SEO is resource hungry and heavily time lagged in delivering its results. So the big risk we run when we set out on a new SEO campaign is whether we’re doing the right thing. One false assumption and we really could be wasting a lot of effort, and crucially we won’t know until long after we’re done.

So in addition to all the extensive market research we do looking at keyword strengths and weaknesses, what else can we do? I know it sounds obvious as we’ve been building up to it, but a test campaign in our PPC program will give us lots of useful data to challenge our assumptions.

Using PPC to challenge our SEO assumptions can help save countless man hours and should be incorporated as part of the optimisation process every time.

Working together

I hope this illustrates how important it is for the programs to work in unison to deliver an overall market strategy that covers all the options for every business keyword. It doesn’t have to be a huge problem that the two campaigns are run by different groups. It does matter that they talk to each other, and talk to each other regularly.

So if everyone’s talking to each other and you’re in a position to decide the strategy, the campaigns will jointly deliver greater benefits to the overall business.