How To Get Your PPC & SEO Working Together

PPC and SEO work best as a joined-up strategy rather than competing channels - in practice however, the two often end up at odds - who’s stealing traffic, whether to bid on brand, who gets the high-priority keywords. But as the Search landscape continues to change and become more volatile with changes such as AI Overviews, it's essential for teams to have a joined-up strategy where the two complement each other in order to maximise visibility and coverage in the SERPs, and overall performance. 

A comprehensive Search strategy should have two channels that complement each other rather than compete with each other. This allows for a variety of benefits:

Improved SERPs coverage, especially in light of new changes with AI Overviews

• Reduction in wasted spend
• Reduced duplication of efforts and improved efficiencies 
• Combined and consistent reporting
• Shared insights and data = smarter decisions

This matters more than ever with the rise of AI Search. AI Overviews and LLM answers are taking over SERPs, pushing organic listings further down the page and reducing brand visibility. When an AI Overview sits at the top answering a query directly, a strong organic or paid position on its own captures less than it used to. Those that build a strategy encompassing every Search channel - organic, paid and the AI Overview itself - are the ones that stay visible overall.

When looking to align your SEO and PPC strategies, there are three areas of focus; keyword strategy, website content and website technical performance.

Complementary Keyword Strategies for SEO and PPC

At the core of both channels are keywords, and having a strategy that pushes and pulls between the channels depending on key factors such as intent or competition is essential. Alignment between paid and organic ensures a unified keyword strategy, and prevents cannibalising traffic and paying for clicks on terms that rank organically.

A quick way to spot this is by reviewing Google Search Console:

1. Filter the Performance report by query to find terms that you are already ranking in the top few organic positions with a healthy click-through rate
2. Cross-reference these against the queries in your Google Ads search terms report. 
3. Where the two overlap, question whether paid is actually adding anything, or just duplicating traffic you would capture organically anyway. If organic already ranks strongly and no competitors are bidding, that budget is usually better spent elsewhere.

How to decide which keywords to assign to PPC vs SEO

When keyword research or Search Behaviour Analysis is undertaken, ensure that both departments run-through the data and assign keywords by targeting strategy based on what it's trying to achieve, or what Search environment it will be playing in. With a commercial term that is high priority, has high competition and low organic rankings, aim for paid. With an informative keyword that is used to bring traffic to site rather than conversions, If there is low competition, focus on organic. 

When assigning channels, many internal factors may come into play, leaning on the benefits of the channel. If a new piece of content is fresh and needs time to build organically but is high-priority, we should ask “can we implement fast-acting paid ads as organic performance builds?”. Likewise if an existing paid keyword drops in priority, conserve budget by assigning it to the SEO team. 

In our experience, some clients prefer to have both paid and organic keywords for landing pages to push overall performance on both channels. We would recommend continuously cross-referencing any budgetary changes on paid to see if any lifts in spend have negatively affected organic performance due to the paid ad being stronger in the SERPs, and ‘taking’ traffic from organic. If this is the case, question if the additional budget is worth it. Review conversion rates coming from each channel to see what kind of user has a higher propensity to convert - if it's even between the two channels or leans towards organic, consider reducing the spend for that keyword to its previous level and review in 2-3 weeks.

SEO vs PPC: Approach to bidding on Brand Keywords

When looking at keyword strategy between the two channels, a key problem area that is worth confirming is your approach to bidding on Brand keywords. This is a common area of friction between PPC and SEO departments, with PPC preferring them to be switched on to help capture all high-intent traffic, which can negatively affect SEO performance if it was previously switched off. 

Search Seven’s position on brand bidding is that if the following are true, then we could run Brand PPC campaigns: 

• Competitors are bidding on the brand name
• Organic listing is not high - in which case could we implement a brand PPC strategy initially  while the SEO team work to improve this?
• The brand name is competitive and/or inclusive of a broader competitive keyword e.g. a business called The Footwear Company bidding on the term ‘footwear’

Creating Website Content That Supports PPC & SEO Performance

Both PPC and SEO benefit from high-quality landing pages and strong content, and can use its keyword data to help push performance. By leveraging keyword data, both departments can identify content gaps and opportunities as well as optimisations, making sharing insights on what users are searching for in regards to a topic area or landing page a quick win. 

When content is strong and well-structured, organic is rewarded by improved rankings, paid is rewarded by an improved Quality Score which reduces CPCs, as well as improved visibility in AI overviews for both channels. Shared content also keeps messaging consistent, making for stronger branding across the SERPs. Guiding landing page changes together ensures updates serve both teams at once, rather than one channel’s fix unintentionally weakening the other’s performance.

PPC relies heavily on relevancy for improved Quality Score, so for clients that have repeated pages for a certain topic, e.g. location-specific landing pages for the same service offering, those types of pages can help boost it. For SEO, this may flag duplicate error issues, and would be done with caution. 

Frequent communication between departments prevents one-sided recommendations that help one channel at the other’s expense. In the location-page example, that means agreeing to keep each page’s content and meta data distinct to the area, so paid gets its relevancy without SEO gaining duplicate content issues. 

Using Paid Search Data to Guide Content

Similar to keyword strategy, there are many ways in which teams can work together and share data to help guide content. As content naturally leans on being driven by organic teams, PPC insights are often missed.

Reviewing and analysing Search Query Reports (SQRs) from Google Ads can be useful by flagging ways in which people are searching for information they are seeking out (e.g. sub categories) due to the variety of targeting methods, essentially casting the net wider than initially thought by account managers or keyword research.

At present, users' search queries can be targeted in a variety of ways, predominantly by traditional Search campaigns, AI Max, and Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs). DSAs are being phased out in favour of AI Max, both of which opt for keywordless targeting and use landing page content to marry up with a users search query. Data from these campaigns are useful keyword mining tools, as it may pick up queries that weren’t originally thought of, as well as more long-tail or detailed queries. This can then be passed back to content teams to address the question or issue and feeds into a content cluster approach - using those mined queries to build out cluster content that answers long-tail variations around a topic, which builds your topical authority. AI Overviews and LLMs pull from content that comprehensively answers a query and its related questions, so the broader and more detailed coverage of a topic, the more likely you are to be the source they cite. 

How Website Technical Performance Influences PPC & SEO

High-quality landing page performance is essential for both channels, with both indexing its content and technical performance to decide positions. SEO relies on site speed, mobile optimisation and technical health (among many other things) for rankings, whereas PPC relies on landing page experience for Quality Score and conversions. 

Using key tools to review technical factors such as PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals will pinpoint specific issues to prioritise. Many of these will then feed directly into both organic rankings and paid landing page experience. 

GA4 is also a useful shared reference point, where you can review landing page reports segmented by session default channel group (Organic Search vs Paid Search) to compare engagement rate, average engagement time and key conversions for the same page across each channel. This can be an additional factor when assigning keywords to specific channels, pushing keywords on channels that have stronger engagement.

Utilising ‘Landing Page Experience’ in Google Ads 

Similar to website content, leaning on PPC data is a common missed opportunity. Teams can review the ‘landing page experience’ metric in Google Ads at keyword level, and share these insights with your SEO counterparts - a common theme found is any pages with low ratings also had bad page speed performance. Once reviewed by organic teams and changes implemented, the landing page experience rating improved, as did Quality Score. 

Optimising sites with UX, CRO and site performance in mind benefits both paid and organic, and unified recommendations prevent any conflicts, such as SEO suggestions that could decrease paid conversion rates. With this in mind, we recommend knowledge sharing and training on the technical website factors that affect Quality Score, so SEOs can bear them in mind when making recommendations off the back of technical audits. 

Key Takeaways

The takeaway is simple: PPC and SEO work best when they are working together. As the search landscape changes so rapidly, agencies and teams that come out ahead are those that focus on overall visibility through treating paid and organic as one joined-up strategy rather than two competing channels. Aligning across the three areas covered - keyword strategy, website content and technical performance - means shared insights, broader SERP coverage and less wasted spend. Start by getting both teams together for quarterly keyword reviews, share your Search reports and landing page data across departments, and build content and technical recommendations that serve both paid and organic.