Google Adwords: Advertising and SEO are two sides of the same coin

Some marketing experts recommend the use of Adwords data to boost SEO strategies. In this post, we will explain why Google Adwords is one of the best tools to improve your search engine positioning, and here you will learn some useful tips to use it.

Google Adwords is, indeed, Google’s advertising platform: One of the main sources of income of this information giant, as well as millions of users who want to promote the products and services of their own brands. Google takes advantage of the fact that more than 90% of users of this search engine find the products or services they need through information searches. Google is looking for users to be able to personally promote their brands to other users who, according to their search profiles, will find products and services in their related feeds that might interest them.

Google Adwords consists of a search network and a display network. The first one consists of Google and non-Google search sites which are related to it. On the other hand, the display network is a set of more than one million websites indexed by Google, as well as videos on YouTube.

The search network may be configured depending on your advertising campaign. You must indicate your budget, your geo-targeting, and language, among other things. Then you need to create the ads on the AdWords platform, for which it is generally recommended to show all the pluses of your business and what differentiates you from your competitors. Then you type the keywords or sentences that your customers will always use to look for your company and your products or services. In this way, when someone searches anything using one of the keywords you have included, your ad will show up.

Google Adwords display network behaves in a very similar way to the search network, although it differs in two particular points. The first one is how to target ads. You will not only be able to guide your users through keywords, but you can use other methods such as themes (display network pages on specific topics) or locations (specific websites that you choose manually.) In the second place, there are the types of ads you can create. Years ago, you could only create text ads, now you can also create graphics and video ads.
Some people disagree about Google Adwords as a useful tool to improve SEO. The main argument is that AdWords is not a ranking factor per se. What happens is that if you invest in Adwords, the organic traffic is triggered and decreases in the opposite case, but the determining factor when it comes to ranking is not Adwords but the organic CTR. Once you have achieved good positions in organic results, with Google Adwords, you usually maximize the number of clicks received on the links that lead to your website, and the reason is organic CTR alone.

Contenders claim that Adwords is just a channel, and if you do a campaign through this channel, first visit and second visit brand traffic will inevitably increase. What actually changes if you use Google Adwords is custom rankings. As you may know, Google uses the previous behavior of the user to re-organize a result already established in order to adapt to the user’s profile based on numerous data. This data can be user metrics, or the device used by him/her (and speed is more important regarding mobiles.) Thus, the ranking is unique for each user and any ranking tool offers no customized data results. Therefore, it is not possible to know the affected rankings but the traffic itself.

However, your positioning will definitely improve if you invest in Adwords. The speed with which you can get results, the control you have over the tool and the possibility of validating if the traffic from search engines is profitable and brings customers are actual facts. What is recommended is linking Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Adwords: This configuration would synchronize all those processes for better analysis capabilities.

Without a doubt, the most valuable factor of Adwords data for SEO is when it comes to keyword research. Any account with a history will tell you which search terms have the highest volumes, and, hence, the greatest opportunities for positioning. You just select the entire period and download the data from the search term report in Excel to start working on your keyword list.

Featured Image courtesy of Barry Schwartz at Flickr.com

Moreover, any manager of an Adwords account can interpret the intentionality of each search when users add negative keywords or pause keywords that do not have high conversion potential. If the optimization is well done, there will be no intentionally keywords in the reports, then you can go to the keyword planner and look for those opportunities to generate your content. Once you’ve identified your keywords, you can keep planning the content marketing strategy you need to bring more visibility to your brand.