Paid vs Organic Keyword Optimisation

[aplnzmarch18]

Hi Im wondering whether I should optimise my site with Organic search terms that drive traffic to the site or the paid terms i use in Google search ads?

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Thanks Christie,

Yeah we could start a book with that lot right? Sometimes people just disappear. Others will still be able to search it though and get help.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi aplnzmarch18, did you see Ed's last response to your question? He's left some extremely thoughtful replies, btw. If any response helped resolve your issue, please mark it as a "good answer." If not, please give us more details so we can help, thanks!

Christy

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Yes you should.  Ad Words results are a brilliant source of insight that informs your organic efforts.  And organic is a brilliant source of insight that informs your AdWords strategy.

But remember Ad Words works a little differently to organic so you add in each keyword permutation or use logical expressions to help google understand when you want your ads to appear.  So in AdWords you may want to show for

"Veneers Cost", "Veneers price", "cost of veneers", "price of veneers", "what's the price of veneers", "how much do veneers cost" etc.

If you put all these permutations exact match into your organic page ten you're going to get an over-optimisation problem because google considers them all to be the same in organic.  So it will think you are keyword stuffing. Just pick the most natural sounding ones from each 'topic' and optimise for them.  Remember it's ot optimising for 'keywords' anymore it's optimising for 'topics'

So optimise for your google PPC words, of course.  But beware that often google will consider similar terms as meaning the same thing and you might end up with over-optimisation by keyword stuffing.

Give me an example specifically of what you're trying to do and I'll help you with more detail.

[aplnzmarch18]

So  in terms of on- page optimisation should I be trying to optimise for words that we bid on in google search adverts AND organic search terms that drive organic traffic to our site? I was thinking there would be benefits from being optimized for these paid words as it would reduce what we spend etc

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Also the mighty Rand (who is always right about everything) say's 'don't take an advertising first approach' https://moz.com/blog/why-paid-ads-fail see it here and my own experience of this is spookily precisely what he describes.  We did paid at first when we were new and nobody clicked.  It barely broke even and those ads were really great ads with a low agency fee.

Now we are augmenting our number one positions with paid ads and killing it and also squeezing competitors out of the market and making them suffer by starting bidding wars.  Some of them have just given up ad words. SO top organic spots put you in a strong position.  The strongest position.

What happens is you overtake a competitor in the serp and they think OMG I need ad words! Then you plonk an ad above them in ad words and they go into a flat spin.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Optimising for search will create organic traffic - this is 'owed media' - the benefits ow owned media are that it's always there so long as you keep optimising.  But a high ranking page can generate lots of revenue on autopilot for many months and years for just a couple of days research and writing time.  The downsides of this is that you have to be a real expert in your field or have done so much research that you can write like one and know how to optimise to get the high rankings that will generate the traffic and revenue.

Organic is not immediate.  It might take a month to get your domain authority up to a reasonable level through link-building and then each page might take a week or month to get onto page one and then after a bit of tweaking to position 1-3 (where the money's at.)

Paid is different - it's immediate.  You don't own it you pay for it.  It's someone else's system (ad words or Facebook) and you're buying their advertising space.  The benefits of this is it can yield instant returns and is extremely flexible so you can run flash sales and offers etc.

There is a huge amount of research to suggest that the long term benefits and ROI or ROE or ROMS (or whichever metric you go for), of organic far outweigh those of paid.  Because when you turn off paid media it's gone.  Whereas you can't turn off organic, it's evergreen and the traffic just keeps coming.

If your questions is more about which keywords to use, traffic ones or money ones then this depends on how your site operates.  But always have money in mind if you're running a business or helping someone else with theirs for a fee.  The highest bid PPC keywords are clearly the ones that are going to generate more conversions and money.  Because the huge google marketplace has decided that for you in a billion ways. So if it's a service business and there are people bidding on '[service] cost' then write an article about cost, price comparisons or what people are actually paying for inside the product (is it research (pharma) or the actual materials (jewellery) or the skill of the creator (art) - so that you rank for cost/price.  Or even just put the cost on there. This is something lots of B2B companies don't do - and it's a conversion killer.  People want to know how much something costs.  Like at least a ballpark figure.

Or if you make your money with the ads network then go you may wish to go after the high traffic keywords and get the traffic so that you get paid more per ad impression. I like to go for both traffic and money.  Why limit yourself to one or the other?  And with traffic comes authority and lots of other benefits, you may find that a bigger site with more traffic is like a snowball and starts attracting links so you can rank better for the money terms too.

But start small. Everything starts from nothing.  And there'll be niche keywords with moderate traffic and low competition and commercial intent that you can rank for to kick things off.

That's a difficult question because it's not 100% clear whether you're asking about paid vs organic or traffic keywords vs commercial intent ones.

Hope this essay helps though. Feel free to ask again if i've misunderstood.