Content – SEO – PPC

High-level tips

You may want to start by putting together a content strategy along the following principles;

First class customer UX (User Experience) online should be a key priority – I’ve always believed, you should put the customer at the heart of what you do and in your business. ‘Happy customers always lead to happy campers’.

• Your content strategy should be produced with the customer in mind.
• Content could be used to support SEO strategy inbound/outbound – all marketing channels.
• PPC ads and site landing page content could be produced based on Social keyword and trend analysis.
• Best practice content guidelines should be produced for web/mobile site.
• Content should always follow company Brand Guidelines where fitting.
• Note, content production could also be influenced by A/B and multi-variant learning’s.

Content could be;

• PPC focused on keyword learning’s to produce key landing pages.
• SEO focused on keyword learning’s to produce key landing pages (onsite/inbound).
• Social content focused on PPC/SEO keyword and social engagement conversations to produce landing pages (onsite/inbound).
• Build key Affiliate partner landing pages on your site (outside PPC/SEO strategy).
• Build key Online Display landing pages reflecting the customer journey for re-targeting and new customer acquisitions.
• Email/RAF landing pages to reflect content written in articles when sending a mail-shot.
• Build campaign led website landing pages (to support SEO/PPC activity).
• Build competition led website landing pages (to support SEO/PPC activity).
• Build key pages, required from the consumer behaviour through insight from your website analytics.
• Pages, required from search-terms through insight on your website ‘SEARCH BOX’.
• Pages, required from insight through ‘Key customer UX tools’ on your website.
• Pages, required from insight through ‘competitor analyses’.
• Landing page on how to ‘Switch’ and Come back to your website with e.g. step-by-step guide.
• Offers page/section could also be considered to support your marketing campaigns.

Technology considerations

• Deep link already captured data– where you can carry already submitted content across from referring traffic to your website (e.g. aggregators and affiliates).
• Dynamic pages – those that are created following descriptors from your marketing activity. E.g. PPC ad description which could land on a targeted keyword page that dynamically updates related content on your website.
• Take leanings and gather converting keywords from any A/B testing tools you may be using.
• Consider a content management system for your in-house channel managers or third party Agencies to build keyword channel & targeted marketing pages on the fly on your website.

PPC ‘Best Practices’ tips

1. Start with reviewing the account structure – campaigns, ad group, ads, bidding

2. Review brand vs non-brand – percentage share, clicks, conversions. Ensure brand search terms are actually going to brand campaigns. And non-brand to non-brand campaigns.

3. Download and analyse search term report for the last 12-16 months. Identify phrases with potential for further optimisation/testing and irrelevant phrases to go into the negative list.

4. Review the negative keyword list – negative keywords are the best defence against impressions from unqualified searches.

5. Assess ad groups, number of ads enabled per ad group, number of keywords in ads, keyword match type:

• Are there enough ad variations in the ad group to help with testing and optimisation?
• Are keyword match types used wisely and what are the results – impressions, clicks conversions

6.   Review and recommend Ads extensions

• How users currently interact with the extensions
• Test new extensions relevant to the business
• Sitelink extensions to link to specific pages
• Price extensions to showcase the product with their prices
• App extensions to encourage people to download and shop through the app
• Location extension to get a physical store location
• Callout extensions to highlight specific attributes – free delivery, returns etc,

Note: Always monitor performance when introducing new extensions. Some may gain extra clicks but not always increase conversions.

7. Landing pages review:

• Review the landing page quality score
• Are the landing pages matching in the best possible way the ads?
• Are the key messages in ads also on the landing page?
• Are they good for conversions?/
• Introduce landing page A/B testing plan to identify the best performing templates. Do that for the different type of campaigns/products

8. Perform a competitor’s PPC analysis – tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Spyfu can give a good overview of competitors paid activities – ads, keywords, landing pages

• Start with the top 5 direct competitors
• Compare our keywords with theirs
• Review their ad copy, targeting, bids, landing pages for overlapping keywords. What can we do better than them to get more clicks/conversions on our ads?
• For relevant keywords, found in the research and not currently used, create new ads

9.  Keyword research:

• Are we targeting the right keywords?
• Are there shifts in search volumes for the targeted keywords over time
• Are our keywords impacted by seasonality?
• Create a keyword universe file with all the relevant for the business keywords
• Add new keywords and update search volumes regularly
• Mark seasonalities

1. How to create a keyword universe:

• Add keywords from the search terms reports
• Use the keywords from the competitor research
• Download queries with impressions and clicks from Google Search Console
• Check with the SEO team if they have a similar document created targeting organic traffic
• Research new keywords with tools like Semrush, Ubbersuggest, Google Keyword Planner

10.  Ad copy:

• Always test and optimise ad copy
• Apply the best performing ad copy across other ad groups
• Use clever messages when bidding on competitor’s brand names – what our product has and theirs don’t

11.  Retargeting creative:

• Use creative ads, retargeting customers who visited the site but didn’t convert – create FOMO (fear of missing out), offer discounts/extended warranty, to contact the sales team for a personalises offer.

SEO ‘Best Practices’ tips

1. Review current organic performance – request access to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Create files with the most visited pages, the best-converting pages and keywords with most of the clicks.

2. If there is a rank tracking tool used internally:

• Review the ranking performance of the tracked keywords in the last 12 months?
• Any dips, gains, what could be the reason for that.
• Use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush to get an overview of top organic keywords and ranking positions

3. Benchmarking against the top competitors for the business:

• Perform a keyword gap analysis – what are the keywords they rank for, comparing them against the keywords we rank for where are the gaps, overlapping keywords etc.

4. Create a keyword universe:

• Using own keywords ( GA, GSC)
• Keywords from the keyword gap analysis
• Additional research based on the business products/services,
• Cluster the keywords into groups
• Mark the keywords based on the search intent – informational, navigational, transactional

5. Technical SEO:

• When was the last technical audit?
• Have all recommendations been implemented?

6. Perform a new technical audit:

• Crawl the site with crawling tools like Screaming frog, Sitebulb, Deep Crawl
• Checking site speed – Page Speed Insight, WebPage test
• Robots.txt and XML sitemaps review – are there important pages blocked from indexing, are all important pages in the sitemap, Are the sitemap structured well
• Mobile first indexing – is the site offer the best experience on mobile
• Canonicals, JavaScript, Backlink profile review
• Review Schema markups implemented and recommend new types
• Review site structure and internal links
• Technical on-page optimisation – image SEO, Video SEO, heading structure
• For eCommerce websites review Faceted navigation and canonicals, review the processes for out of stock and seasonal products

7. Produce a technical backlog

• Prioritise the technical task
• Identify the stakeholders required for each of the tasks – product managers, developers, Q&As
• Monitor performance after completion

8. Creating a content strategy:

• Understand the business audience
• Audit existing content
• Keyword mapping and content hubs (what could fit as evergreen content)
• How SEO activities can benefit from PPC campaigns

9. For international businesses consider also:

• Tackling content in different languages
• Geo-redirection
• Implement hreflangs