Ways to leverage SEO and paid ads together
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Ways to leverage SEO and paid ads together
SEO and various forms of paid ads help build stronger brands and drive more revenue. Let's discuss how to make them work together.
Hey, all you SaaS content marketers,
You’ve heard phrases like “SEO vs paid ads.” It’s a dated social media trope that, depending on the services you sell, tries to position one as more valuable than the other.
It’s (hopefully) safe to say that most nuanced marketing professionals understand this is not the dynamic between these two distribution techniques.
However, it’s very much the case that plenty of marketing folks silo their paid and SEO campaigns – because they don’t fully understand how to make them work together.
So let’s talk about how teams can use these two channel types harmoniously for the greatest impact.
Retarget & remarket with paid social, Google Display ads, or YouTube ads
SEO is a killer channel for distributing most of your educational content. You know this.
That content, once ranking, attracts organic traffic that should fall within your ICP parameters because you’re targeting questions, goals, & solutions that your ICP frequently has.
The most straightforward way to start leveraging paid ads and SEO is to retarget this organic traffic with paid social ads, YouTube, or Google Display Ads.
A lot of companies like to retarget using either of the following strategies:
Use retargeting to nurture/add an additional touch point with a prospect via more content options that are relevant to the page or article they came to your website on
Use retargeting to draw a dotted line between the valuable educational content they found organically to the fact that you have a useful product or service
In the first bullet - the searcher might have landed on a page about how to measure the attribution of a content marketing program. The paid social team might retarget them with related topics you have in the following formats:
Webinar/thought leadership video ads
Event promotion ads
Podcast/Newsletter promotions
State of attribution report you’ve created with first-party data ads
You’re acknowledging that someone who viewed a specific URL, based on the intent of that piece and its place higher in the funnel, will benefit from more free educational content from you before you move them further into the buying journey.
In the second bullet - you’re acknowledging that, in some instances, a piece of educational content might very well fall in the middle of your specific product funnel. The person reading that content is likely further along in their journey and will have a higher chance of reacting to retargeting ads that feature:
More first-party data insights for in-channel value (see clip below)
Contextualized demos of your products
Testimonials & case studies
Comparisons between your product and your competitors
Straightforward brand, service, or product ads
--> Click here to watch/listen to this full podcast episode with Jonathan Bland.
4 times it makes sense to bid and optimize for the same keywords
This is the part that trips up most SEO and paid teams when we’re talking about alignment between organic search and paid search strategies.
Why?
In simple terms: search intent.
A lot of keywords work really well for organic search but don’t perform well on paid search and vice versa, largely because of the type of intent they serve.
A very high-level rule of thumb is that SEO is really great for educational-intent topics usually meant for:
Ultimate guide and everything you need to know topics
How-to, what-is, and why topics
Examples content
Tip listicles
Best and alternatives listicles
Review articles
Comparison pages
Example: how long does it take to rank on google
Google assigns this keyword an educational intent in which a user is looking for a long-form content example to read about the nuances surrounding the time to rank. This particular keyword will likely be best served by the SEO team as the results don’t imply any type of commercial or transactional intent with it.
Paid search, on the other hand, is strongest when it focuses on commercial and transactional-intent keywords usually meant for a landing page that can feature:
Best and alternatives listicles
Review articles
Comparison pages
Testimonials
Demo landing pages
Free trial sign-ups
Brand-specific or product-specific pages
Example: crm for small businesses
Notice how the intent of the keyword “crm for small businesses” is more commercial or transactional in nature, which is why it makes sense to target searchers with paid ads here.
This keyword also falls into a unique category of mixed intent queries, which transitions into our first of four times when it makes sense to target keywords with both SEO and paid search ads.
1) When the keywords have mixed intent
Some keywords fall into educational-commercial or educational-transactional intent buckets meaning that someone is shopping but also trying to learn more about specific products as they get closer to making their final decision.
You might have noticed in our two lists above that paid and organic search shared a couple of common content types that work well:
Best and alternatives listicles
Review articles
Comparison pages
Ranking and paying for these queries means owning more real estate on highly competitive keyword SERPs and, most importantly, having an aligned intent between organic results and what you’re offering in the ad space above.
Rand Fishkin once addressed the impact of being seen multiple times on the same SERP (source of the image below).
2) When you can’t rank for important product keywords, YET
Search for the keyword "CRM software" and look at the organic results. If you are, in fact, working for a CRM software company, you know that that's a valuable keyword.
The reality, however, is that only 4 CRM companies have managed to crack the top 10 results, and the keyword itself is incredibly competitive (with some of the highest authority domains on the web taking up the top 20).
If you’re a lesser-known or niche CRM software provider like Nutshell, you’re likely going to benefit from running paid ads to get a top spot on the SERP, in addition to building a content page that you can work to optimize over time as you build authority.
3) Give specific SEO content greater backlink potential (Also works for paid social)
It’s vitally important to caveat this one, or you risk wasting money and earning very few backlinks (possibly none).
When promoting SEO content via paid search, certain types of content bring backlinks to your website better than others.
We know that a lot of folks swear that if you “create great content,” you’ll naturally earn backlinks, but it’s just not the case that every topic - even done well, will earn links.
If you want to drive more backlinks to your website or to a specific piece of content, you can support the following SEO content types with your paid ads:
Free tools (Calculators, generators, audit crawlers)
Templates, calendars, spreadsheets
Industry-specific metrics, statistics, and trend reports
Content that highlights hard-to-access, first-party data
These tend to be fairly competitive topics that are either highly useful to your industry peers/customers when completing their professional tasks, or they help others with journalist-like research projects.
Either way, these groups of people tend to reward these topics with citations via backlinks.
***Note that this same type of SEO content also makes for strong paid social fuel as well to increase traffic and backlink potential.
4) When Google serves a significant number of ads and rich features above position 1
There are also times when you’ll see a benefit to running paid search ads alongside organic content when Google starts including rich snippets and 4 ads above the fold.
Depending on the keywords, you’ve probably noticed that some SERPs don’t feature an organic listing until you’re more than halfway down the page.
Google “content strategy template” again and notice how far you have to scroll before you get to position 1.
Message and topic testing with paid ads before making your SEO content
Paid ads, whether via social or search, bring you various types of data more quickly than SEO can (at least when you’re just starting out).
That data should work to inform various parts of your SEO strategy over time, informing how you can most effectively build parts of your roadmap closest to your product solutions and ICP interests.
Things like:
Which topics generate the most landing page visits?
Which topics create more engagement?
Which topics generate leads or downloads?
Which topics result in the largest deals or a specific type of deal?
Which topics are most profitable for the company?
Which topics resonate the most with specific audiences?
Which topics result in nothing at all?
Did the title or description of the ad make a difference? How?
From there, you can search for the mixed intent queries and the educational queries that align with that data to ensure you’re creating content that your customers/prospects care about.
***Note: This is most impactful if you are generating significant traction via paid ads. If you’re still searching for product market fit - then the actual usable SEO data will remain limited as the only ads and topics generating results might not make sense from an SEO perspective.
Time to send that cross-functional meeting invite
Now it’s time to join forces again and see if the SEO and content teams can sync up with the paid ads team to move the needle that much more.
And we’d love to hear if you’ve tried anything specific when combining your SEO and paid data to drive more significant impacts at your company. Let us know, and we can help share it with our wider audience as well.
Have more questions related to this topic? Feel free to ask us on LinkedIn or respond to this e-mail.
Related + New Resources For Your Team
[Watch/Listen 👁️👂] Episode 38: How Paid, Organic, and Content Work Together Feat. Jonathan Bland of Omni Lab
Nate and Jonathan Bland of Omni Lab discuss the latest in paid ads and the use of content assets to drive home better results for SaaS companies.
Take me to this resource -->
[Read 📖] How do you convert your organic traffic from your SaaS blog?
Unlock the hidden potential of your organic traffic and optimize your content to convert more SaaS customers by addressing these six common obstacles standing in your way.
Take me to this resource -->
[Watch/Listen 👁️👂] Episode 35: Amplifying Non-Optimized Content with SEO
Nate and Derek discuss SEO and SaaS marketing - specifically, how SEO can support company growth and why a "pure" SEO strategy can conflict with your other SaaS marketing efforts.
Take me to this resource -->
[Read 📖] How to Choose Content Marketing Topics That Will Grow People's Interest in Your SaaS Company
In this article, we'll walk you through some of the ways our strategists and content marketers think about what and when to choose certain content topics.
Take me to this resource -->