Beyond Keywords: 2 Steps for Balancing SEO and PPC

Your PPC data, by bidding on broad and phrase-match branded keywords, should help determine exactly what variations consumers are searching for that you may not already be targeting. Then you can run a ranking report to find branded keywords you're not ranking No. 1 for organically.

If you find any gaps in your SEO visibility, develop new content or optimize existing content to make sure you're ranking No. 1 as close to 100 percent of the time as possible. Conversely, if you find branded keywords that you're ranking well in for SEO but not in PPC, consider allocating more budget to improve coverage of these terms, or consider making changes to the landing page or account structure to improve your quality score, and your PPC rank along with it.

For non-branded keywords, prioritize those keywords you're targeting in both SEO and PPC, as typically your most valuable keywords (those that convert the best) are going to be expensive in PPC and very competitive in SEO. While there may be mission-critical keywords that you'll definitely want to target in both SEO and PPC, a smart approach is to start by looking for the "long-hanging fruit" opportunities.

Take a keyword list of your top thousand or so best performing keywords in PPC and run a ranking report to see which keywords already have decent (but not first page) organic SEO visibility. These keywords should be a high priority for SEO, as they're proven performers in PPC and already have some SEO visibility upon which to build.

To identify opportunities for PPC, take a list of your 100-plus best-performing, non-branded SEO keywords and ensure all keywords have been added to your account as an exact match. For top-performing SEO keywords not in your PPC account, build spend estimates for these keywords and try to launch new campaigns for as many of these keywords as possible. You will likely find you're already bidding on a lot of your top-performing SEO keywords in PPC, in which case you just need to adjust spend upward slightly to ensure joint first-page visibility for these keywords.