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How to Get Google Ads & SEO Working Together

Dijitally

SEO, Google Ads

December 6, 2022

3 min read

Want to know how Google Ads & SEO can work together for the greater good? Keep reading this blog to find out how.

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How to Get PPC & SEO Working Together

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While it might seem that PPC and SEO are at odds with one another, they certainly don’t have to be. In fact, we’d recommend that they work in unison to ensure your customers can stay in the sales funnel for longer while also creating further channel optimisation opportunities for your business.

The bigger cause of friction between the two channels often occurs because we tend to use different sources of measurement for each channel which creates silos of communication between internal and external teams.

This then spills into other areas such as reporting, landing pages, and budget.

That’s the bad news. The good news is there are several ways you can get both channels, and their teams, to work together for the greater good. In fact, we’ve got four effective ways you can achieve this.

Get First-Party Data

Given the depth and breadth of changes that have occurred over the last few years with data & privacy, it’s imperative that all businesses are across first-party data.

Understanding whether your brand is compliant with this will require input from both your Google Ads and SEO teams. They need to communicate effectively to make this work.

If you’re campaigns rely heavily on remarketing campaigns, you might find yourself becoming increasingly reliant on native audiences.

These audiences are powerful, but most of them do underperform against audiences based on brand-tracked activity.

To counter this, we’d recommend segmenting audiences to reduce any quality fluctuation.

The key to remember here for both teams is to ensure that all first-party data collected is always protected either through hashing or synced through tools.

Domain Name Structure

A super important element when it comes to acknowledging and adapting based on domain structure choices.

We’d recommend choosing one of the three options below when setting up brand URLs:

Vanity domains and country domains
One domain for everything (this also includes international domains)
Subdomains for various initiatives

Regardless of your choice, your Google Ads-specific pages need to be noindex/nofollow and allow crawl bots to access them so they can contribute to a high-quality score.

In our experience, it’s rare that non-e-commerce brands will be served better by keeping everything in the same domain.

This is due to the fact that there are strategic elements of a well-optimised site than can run counter to Google Ads:

Paid ads benefit from testing landing pages; duplicate content is a no-no in SEO land
Google Ads benefits from a leaner navigation bar rather than a robust one which is more suited to an SEO strategy
Often a redirect is necessary for an SEO strategy, whereas a Google Ad campaign will be disapproved if it points to a redirected landing page

We’d recommend mitigating these issues by having subdomains that can not only benefit from the main domain, without forcing any creative or tech compromises between the SEO and PPC campaign teams.

SEO teams should inform the Google Ads management team at least 3-5 days prior to implementing redirects to avoid any disruption to campaigns.

Use Search Query Reports

Without a doubt, one of the best ways to get both teams working together is to share data via search queries.

As a Google advertising team, you’ll already be aware of what’s converting so sharing that data with the SEO team will help influence their content marketing strategy, particularly with respect to blog content.

Despite how easy of an opportunity this may seem, this is one that is often overlooked.

Understanding what existing customers want and need, and how they think will help prioritise variations of keywords.

Both SEO and Google Ad teams should be sharing search term data so their brands are able to receive insights on the viability of content and auction prices.

Given the depth and breadth of changes that have occurred over the last few years with data & privacy, it’s imperative that all businesses are across first-party data.

Talk to Each Other

We know this might be mind-blowing but there is plenty of good that comes about when both teams start talking to each other.

Whether it's a 10-15 minutes chat or something longer, taking the time to discuss various problems and advancements in each sector will ensure that the other is able to respond or excel.

In the event that your counterpart works for another agency, then you can always ask for a joint meeting with the client. This is what all good SEO & Google Ads agencies do.

Conclusion

In short, siloing both channels can lead to sub-par performances when combining both can ensure that your client’s business can stay in the sales funnel for longer moving them from brand awareness to conversion (whatever that may be).

We hope that the above four recommendations will ensure that this result can occur and that these two channels can work together rather than separately.