Google ads is more than an advertising platform
. It's a treasure trove of data that SEOs can use to improve organic visibility for their site. And today, I'm going to show you a few of my favorites tried and tested ways to use Google search ads to improve SEO on both Google and YouTube. Stay tuned. [music] If you're like most people and keep SEO and PPC campaigns separate, you're making a mistake. You're missing out on a ton of reliable data that can be used for SEO to gain the long term benefits of free and passive search traffic from Google and YouTube. Now, over the past year, I've spent some time advertising on YouTube and a bit on Google and I've found some cool ways to use the data to improve SEO. So let's kick things off with the first use case, which is to find keywords that result in conversions. Not every keyword you bid on or rank for is going to result in customers.
Google Ads features
But Google Ads features a conversion tracking feature that allows you to attribute an action on your website to a keyword. To set this up, just go to the Conversionssettings in your Google ads account. Now, if I hover over "website," you'll see that you can track things like Online sales, link clicks, and sign-ups. So click the website icon, and then fill out the form to set up your conversion action. Now, after you've spent enough money to get some conversion data, go to the Search terms report. And this report shows you a list of queries where your ad was shown to a significant number of people. You can see things like Impressions, interactions, the average cost per click, total conversions, and conversion rate, which is a percentage of the number of clicks to conversions.
Now, I want to note that the reason why you're seeing zero conversions is that we haven't used the conversion tracking pixel for years. In fact, we even got rid of Google Analytics. But assuming you have the conversion tracking pixel on your site, you can simply sort the table by the Conversion or Conversion rate column, and see which keywords are converting visitors or viewers into sign-ups. So let's draw out a hypothetical scenario
CPC conversion
Let's say that the query, "website checker" had an average CPC of $2 and your break-even cost was $40. That means you need to convert one visitor for every 20 clicks to break even. Now, if your cost per conversion was $50, then from an ads perspective, you're losing $250 for every one thousand dollars spent. So let's do a bit of reverse engineering. With this information, you know that ranking for the query, "website checker" will lead to conversions. You also know that you're going to need around25 clicks to urge one conversion. Now, let's find out how much traffic you could get if you ranked in the #1 position for that keyword. So I'll take the top-ranking page'sURL and put it into Site Explorer. Then I'll head over to the organic keywords report. And it looks like they get around 3,500 monthly search visits for the query "website checker" just from the US. So if 25 clicks lead to a lead or customer, then you'd get around 140 of them monthly, just when people look for "website checker" and click on your website. And if a conversion is worth $40, then that's $5,600 in value each month from free organic traffic! So assuming I wanted to travel then query, I'd toss it into Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. Then, I'd scroll to the overview, and assess what it would take to outrank the rest of the competition. And I talk about assessing ranking difficulty in our keyword research tutorial, so I'll link that up in the description. Alright, the next use case is to find keyword opportunities as well as pages that can benefit from on-page optimizations. According to Google, 15% of queries they see a day haven't been seen before.
on-page optimizations
can enjoy on-page optimizations. consistent with Google, 15% of queries they see a day hasn't been seen before. Broad match modifiers ensure your ads are only shown for searches that include words you've marked with a sign. for instance, if you were to bid on a keyword like "leather shoes" wrapped in quotes, you're only bidding on queries that match that exact phrase. But if you bid on queries with broad match modifiers like +leather +shoes, then that might include queries like "leather work shoes." By using broad match modifiers, you'll usually broaden your keyword pool without having to understand the precise phrasing searchers are using. So after you've run the ads for long enough, go to the Search terms report
we're getting to search for two things:
Yoast SEO
run ads on might be"eCommerce SEO"
since we have a fanatical page on the subject, we're ranking within the top3, but have a very low CTR of just 1.6%. Now, it is vital to notice that our CTR may not actually be this low since Search Console includes impressions made by bots (i.e. a rank tracker tool), but regardless, we may benefit from improving CTR for this question since thepost incorporates our tools pretty heavily. Alright, therefore the next thing we'd like to try to do is to create a list of keywords we will bid on for our ad. So on a filterless version of the search results report, I'll set a page filter and I'll enter our eCommerce SEO URL slug here. And from here, you'll filter through the queries to seek out relevant keywords that might be worth targeting. Now, since Search Console shows average positions and won't show you each keyword
Ahrefs' Site Explorer completely free
you rank for, you'll use Ahrefs' Site Explorer completely free on websites you own. Just check-in for an AWT account and verify your website. After you're found out, attend Site Explorer and enter the URL you would like to research. Next, head on over to the OrganicKeywords report. And here, you'll see the keywords the page ranks for, the position we saw it in on this date, and also use these filters to quickly get the info you would like. From here, you'll start your campaign with various ad copy combinations, run the ads for a period of your time, and see which one performs the simplest. And after you've found a winner, just change the title tag and meta description to urge more clicks to your page. the subsequent thing you'll do is to urge backlinks by advertising for queries with "link intent."
Some people will naturally earn links consistently simply because they rank at the highest of Google. and that is one of the large benefits of Google search ads. you'll pay to possess your page to appear at the highest of Google's search results. But you cannot just advertise for any keyword and expect it to steer to backlinks. Otherwise, you'd burn through your budget with little to point out. therefore the goal is to earn backlinks at a reasonable cost, whatever which may be to you. and therefore the best thanks to doing this is to bid on queries that have so-called "link intent", meaning, the people checking out the query are actually trying to find resources to link to.
who are these people? Bloggers and journalists
And. Now, finding these queries are often tough and you really won't know the result until you've actually purchased the ads and waited for an inexpensive period of your time. And other factors come into play just like the quality of your content. Meaning… if your content is poor, then ads aren't a magical formula to draw in links. But one sort of content that we've tested with great results is statistics pages. for instance, we spent around $1,200 on Google ads promoting this page on SEO statistics. The ads actually resulted in a good number of high-quality backlinks and it helped us rank in position 1 and a couple of for our target queries. to seek out topics worth targeting, you'll use a tool like Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer and look for topics associated with your industry. So in our case, that might be SEO, content marketing, and blogging. Next, attend the Phrase Match Report. Finally, hit the Include button and search for the word statistics. And now you will see the keyword metrics for each of those queries.
Now, this only tells us about the number of monthly searches you'll expect from a selected country. But it doesn't affirm the very fact that you can get links from it. therefore the next thing you'll be wanting to try to do is to hit the button to ascertain the metrics on the highest 10 ranking pages. and everyone you're really trying to find is to see if the highest pages have tons of referring domains pointing at them. And within the case of content marketing statistics, they do. But this still doesn't tell us whether these pages are earnings links on a uniform basis. So to dig deeper, just click on the caret beside one among the top-ranking URLs and attend the Overview page. And as you'll see from this graph, they've had a steady growth in new referring domains since about December 2018. And if we glance at Optinmonster's ranking history for that keyword, you will see that December 2018 is additionally round the time when they started ranking at the highest of Google. If this strategy interests you, then I highlyrecommend watching our full case study on how we built links to our statistics page with google ads, which I'll meet up with within the description.
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