Your website is one of the most powerful online resources you have for generating traffic, bringing in qualified visitors and leads, and – ideally – scoring meaningful conversions and sales. To ensure your website is firing on all cylinders, you will need to utilise a healthy mix of effective organic SEO strategies as well as paid solutions, such as those offered through Google AdWords.
While using both of these approaches is ideal for your website, you also need to be mindful of how to ensure they’re working in harmony with one another, rather than against each other.
In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the following:
- The purpose of organic SEO;
- The purpose of paid ads;
- How to ensure your paid efforts don’t cannibalise your organic efforts; and
- How to make your paid efforts more effective through proper alignment with your SEO efforts
The Purpose of Organic SEO – Search Rankings, AI Discoverability, and Qualified Traffic
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been around for decades and remains one of the most important – and effective – means of enabling websites to rank higher for relevant search queries on platforms such as Google and Bing.
While the early days of SEO involved a lot of questionable practices, such as keyword stuffing and creating content farms (these are known as black hat SEO strategies), the sophistication of modern-day search engines have made these kinds of shortcuts unviable. If Google notices any website using black hat strategies, they will punish those websites and drop their rankings.
Nowadays, good SEO is all about high-quality content that’s written for actual visitors, well-optimised websites (in terms of device responsiveness, clean code, security, etc.), and an intuitive user experience (UX).
It’s also important to note that the same best practices that boost your search engine rankings will also boost the likelihood of AI platforms (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, etc.) indexing your site and sourcing information from it for different user queries – whether they’re doing a search through AI or simply asking it a question where it pulls information from a plethora of sources.
The other core function of good SEO is that it helps make your website discoverable to the right audience. The more refined your strategy, including the type of content you upload to your site, the better your chances of capturing the exact people you want to discover you.
This can be achieved by focusing on specific keywords or niche key phrases associated with your industry; implementing local SEO efforts to ensure your business features more dominantly for people within your area (particularly important if you have a physical store or office); and writing content (such as blogs) that focuses on capturing longer-tail keywords/key phrases that may capture a smaller but more qualified subset of traffic.
By catering your SEO efforts in this way, you’ll slowly but surely build a presence that brings in the right audience and can lead to sustained conversions over time.
The Purpose of Paid Search – Drive Immediate Awareness, Conversions, and Sales
If SEO is the long game, then paid search is its complementary sibling that helps your business secure more sales and/or clients in the here-and-now. No doubt you’re familiar with what paid search ads look like, even if you’ve never run any before for your own business.
Through Google Ads, you’ll see them as ‘Sponsored results’ or, in the case of product listings, ‘Sponsored products’. Bing Ads, whether showing a line of sponsored products or a paid search result, will have the word ‘Sponsored’ included, though in a smaller font than Google.
As an example, here are how sponsored results for ‘rental properties’ search shows on both platforms.
Google Ad
Bing
These types of ads typically work through a pay-per-click (PPC) system. You place a bid on certain keywords or key phrases (such as ‘rental properties’) and, if your bid is the highest and the ad is well-aligned to the page/pages you’re leading users to, then your ad will likely achieve the top result. You will only pay the bid amount if a user ends up clicking through on any of the links in the ad.
Paid search ads are the ideal option when you’re wanting to boost awareness or sales in the immediate future, or to help promote a brand new product, service, or notable change in your business.
Combining solid SEO efforts with paid search campaigns can go a long way in helping your business succeed, but there is an important facet of this combined approach you need to be aware of – cannibalisation.
Avoiding Cannibalisation and Aligning Your Organic and Paid Efforts
If you’re unfamiliar with what cannibalisation is within the context of paid search and organic SEO, it’s where the marketing efforts of both approaches end up competing against each other instead of working together. In the simplest sense, it’s typically a situation where one or more of your paid search campaigns are targeting the same or notably similar keywords to those you’ve already used and rank highly in through organic efforts.
For example, if you have a page that organically ranks at number 1 for a search term such as ‘commercial freezers melbourne’, running an ad campaign that targets the exact same search term could then impact that organic performance. This confused competition between your organic results and paid results can lead to a wasted budget that would otherwise have been better spent on a lower-performing keyword or key phrase that gets less organic traction but good conversions.
Below are a few considerations you can account for in preventing this type of cannibalisation and to better align your organic and paid efforts for the best ROI.
Incrementality testing
If you’ve been running ads that target keywords that your organic efforts already rank highly on, this could result in needless expenditures for any paid clicks – especially if users are clicking through on the ad but not converting at rates that are profitable.
Incrementality testing involves pausing the ads that are targeting the same keywords you organically rank highly for to see if your organic traffic rebounds and can offset any monetary losses that occurred during the paid ads run.
Strategic exclusions
Strategic exclusions are an effective means of ensuring certain keywords are ignored in your paid search efforts. You can do so by setting these negative keywords in your Google Ads campaigns. Identify the terms where you already hold a dominant organic ranking (such as the first couple positions) and add them to your negative keywords. That way, your ad campaigns will only focus on terms where you have lower or minimal rankings.
Intent segmentation
This is a strategy that can help avoid cannibalisation while also ensuring your SEO and paid search complement one another. The basic approach is that you reserve your pay-per-click (PPC) ads for high-intent, transactional terms (such as ‘buy coffee machine’) while your organic efforts focus on information or long-tail keywords/terms (e.g. ‘how to clean a coffee machine’).
Aligning ad copy with landing page copy
Optimising the landing pages where your ads lead to can be a great way to boost your ad performance and even potentially reduce the cost-per-click. Landing page copy that more closely matches the copy contained in your ads can positively influence your Google Ads Quality Score. This alignment of copy is also a good general practice as it often results in better lead generation and conversion rates.
Using Remarketing to Capture Organic Visitors Who Didn’t Convert
Through cross-channel remarketing, you can target and re-engage users who initially visited your site through an organic search but did not convert at the time. This can be particularly effective when served to the user within the first few hours to days of their original visit.
Targeting High-Competition Keywords Through Paid and Organic
While paying to target less competitive keywords you already hold a strong organic ranking over can cause cannibalisation, there are certain keywords that simply have so much competition around them that even the best organic efforts won’t guarantee a top ranking against the ocean of competitors vying for the same visibility. For these types of high-volume, high-competition keywords, even if you already generate a lot of organic traffic from them, there can still be value in running paid ads that target them, as well.
Paid ads may be your only way of cutting through the noise of other competitors and driving conversions and revenue from them, even when you do a solid job with organic efforts. And by combining paid and organic together for these specific campaigns, you can increase your website’s visibility in a highly-contested area – surfacing both your organic and paid results, which will greatly increase the likelihood of someone clicking through and learning about your business. Sometimes, when dealing with the biggest keywords, even additional impressions and exposure can be a genuine win.
This is ultimately your call, and you can always take an approach where you place money into capturing the main high-competition keyword (e.g. ‘running shoes’) while your organic efforts focus on related terms (e.g. “runners”, “running shoes melbourne”, “running shoes for cross country”, etc.).
To get the most out of your paid search and SEO marketing efforts, it’s always a good idea to engage with an experienced agency or ad provider who knows how to balance the paid and organic efforts for the best return.
If you’re looking to refine your paid search campaigns and ensure they work in harmony with your SEO efforts, Reform Digital can help. Our team of SEO and PPC experts can help you find the right balance of paid and organic so that you get the best results and don’t risk cannibalisation.
Ready to get started? Reach out to us today.
