the relationship between seo and google ads

Read time: 8 minutes

Understanding the relationship between SEO and Google Ads is crucial if you want your business to be found online. For the best results on Google, we need to spend time both optimising our websites and our ads. An effective SEO strategy will help your Google Ads perform better, and good Google Ads will help your SEO strategy. In this post, we’ll discuss how the two can work together to improve your website presence, but first, let’s dive into some definitions.

SEO (search engine optimisation)

SEO is the process of optimising your website so that it shows up in search results. When optimising for SEO, we need to look at both the content (copy) and the functionality of a website. Both the content on a website and the usability will impact the ranking position in Google search results. Need more information? Check out this post: What does it mean to optimise your website?

Google Ads

Google Ads is a paid advertising tool that allows you to position your website listing at the top of Google results pages for selected search terms. Whenever you’ve searched for a product or service, you will have seen different forms of Google Ads at the top of the search results. For more information on Google Ads, check out this post: How do Google Ads work?

The relationship between SEO and Google Ads

When SEO and Google Ads are used together, they form a mutually beneficial relationship that works to boost the overall performance of a website. Creating a relationship between SEO and Google Ads can drastically improve your Google ranking and increase sales on your website.

A strong SEO strategy will result in more people visiting your website. More visitors will prove to Google that your website is relevant to users searching for topics relevant to your industry. As a result, it sees that your Google Ads are also relevant to users and thus favours your advertisements against competitors. Simultaneously, Google Ads can provide insights about your website which you can use to optimise your site and ultimately improve your SEO.

How SEO helps Google Ads

Maximises the potential of your keywords

When choosing keywords for your Google Ads campaign, you should be making sure the same keywords are on your website. The keywords you’ve been focusing on in your SEO strategy should be included in your Google Ads campaign as Google will look to your website to see if the words you’ve listed are relevant to your business. If you include keywords that aren’t found on your website, your Google Ads will have a low ‘quality score’ and may not ever be shown to customers searching that phrase.

Shows Google that your website is up to date

Another thing Google is looking for when deciding to show your ads is whether or not your site has up-to-date information. Posting regular content as part of your SEO strategy is a great way to show Google that your website is active and that all information is current. Regular content updates could include blog posts, updated business information, new FAQs or new images. These regular updates to your website give Google confidence that your ads are directing users to an active website and therefore show your ads more often to searchers.

Tailored landing pages for more targeted ads

Creating search engine optimised landing pages for each of your products and services will help you both improve your organic (unpaid) ranking on Google and create more targeted ads. For each product you want to advertise, you can create a targeted ad that directs customers to the relevant landing page. With more targeted ads, Google will be able to advertise your website to searchers who are more likely to purchase from your business.

How Google Ads help SEO

Reveals your best performing keywords

Google Ads provide great insight on the performance of your target keywords. With Google Ads, you can see which keywords attract the most visitors and result in the most sales. Using this information, you can build on your SEO strategy, focusing on optimising your website for the most successful keywords.

Diagnoses issues with your ads and landing pages

While SEO helps to keep ads and landing pages consistent, Google Ads can help diagnose the issues between the two. If your ads are receiving lots of clicks but not many conversions, it might be because your customers can’t find what they’re looking for once they land on your website. If this is the case, you should adjust your SEO strategy to focus on making your website easier to navigate and making your content more relevant to your customer’s needs.

Provides insight on customer search terms

Google Ads has a feature that shows you what your customers searched for when they found your ad. Looking at these search terms, you can discover new keywords to focus on in your SEO strategy.

We hope this blog helped you to understand the relationship between SEO and Google Ads!

At Redsteps Web, we help businesses get found online through both organic (SEO) and paid search (Google Ads). Contact us today to find out more!

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