How to use Google Ads to Improve SEO
Introduction
google ads is more than an advertising platform it's a treasure trove of data that seo scan use to improve organic visibility for their site and today i'm going to show you a few of my favorite tried and tested ways to use google search ads to improve seo on both google and youtube stay tuned if you're like most people and keep seo and ppc campaigns separate you're making a mistake you're missing out on a ton of reliable data that can be used for seo to gain the long-term benefits of free and passive search traffic from google and youtube now over the past year i've spent some time advertising on youtube and a bit on google and i found some cool ways to use the data to improve seo so let's kick things off with the first use case which is to find keywords that result in conversions notevery keyword you bid on or rank foris going to result in customers but google ads has a conversion tracking feature that lets you attribute an action on your website to a keyword to set this up.
Step-1
just go to the conversion settings in your google ads
account now if i hover over a website you'll see that you can track things like
online sales link clicks and sign ups so click the website icon and then fill out
the form to set up your conversion action now after you've spent enough time to
get some conversion data go to the search terms report and this report shows
you a list of queries where your ad was shown to a significant number of people
you can see things like impressions interactions the average cost per click
total conversions and conversion rate which is a percentage of the number of clicks
to conversions now i want to note that the reason why you're seeing zero
conversions is because we haven't used the conversion tracking pixel for years
infact we even got rid of google analytics but assuming you have the conversion
tracking pixel on your site you can simply sort the table by the conversion or
conversion rate column and see which keywords are converting visitors or
viewers into sign ups so let's draw out ahypothetical scenario let's say that
the quarry website checker had an average cpc of two dollars and your break
even cost was forty dollars that means you need to convert one visitor for
every 20 clicks to break even.
Step-2
Step-3
the next use case is to find keyword opportunities as well as pages that can benefit from on-page optimizations according to google 15 of queries they see every day have never been seen before that means billions of quarries are going unnoticed and if google doesn't even know them then third-party keyword research tools probably won't either to set yourself up for success you can try bidding on keywords using broad match modifiers broad match modifiers ensure your ads are only shown for searches that include words you've marked with the plus sign for example if you were to bid on a keyword like leather shoes wrapped in quotes you're only bidding on quarries that match that exact phrase but if you bid on quarries with broad match modifiers like plus leather plus shoes then that would include quarries like leather work shoes by using broad match modifiers you can usually broaden your keyword pool without having to know the exact phrasing searchers are using so after you've run the ads for long enough go to the search terms report and we're going to look for two things number one new topics that are worth pursuing and two long tail queries you may not have optimized for so i'm in the search terms report and i've set the filter for one of our youtube ad campaigns from here you can set more filters like a minimum clicks impressions ctr or whatever you can also sort by column heading or combination of the two which can help you narrow in on specific sub sets you might be looking for now all you need to do is scroll through the report and look for queries that would make sense to target or look for queries where you already have existing content that could be better optimized for example yoast seo tutorial seems like a pretty popular topic that we haven't covered as you can see from the number of impressions and we actually have a full playlist on blogger seo so it might make a good fit for our channel scrolling down even further you'll see long tail queries like what is seo and how does it work well we have a video on the main topic what is seo so i use this data to add the modifier and how does it work to our title tag as it fits naturally and that's exactly what the video is about generally speaking the more ads you runthe more data you'll have meaning the more opportunities you'll be able to find the next use case is to improve click-through rates on your organic search resultsit's widely believed that a higher click-through rate can lead to improve drankings but even if it doesn't more clicks equals more visitors now since search ads allow you to manipulate the title and description you can try different versions of ad copy to try and find a winning combinationso first you need to find a page to optimize to do this go to the search results report in google search console and make sure that you have average ctr and average position selected next set afilter to only show keywords in the top five or so positions finally sort the table by ctr in ascending order now what you're looking for here are primary keyword targets that have a low ctr but are ranking in ahigh position you'll also want to ignore branded queries that aren't yours so for us we might ignore keywords like advanced google search.
Step-4
since people searching for that probably want to actually use google's advanced search feature you might also want to ignore really broad queries like https as search intent could be mixed or not crystal clear so for us a query to run ads on might be ecommerce seo since we have a dedicated page on the topic we're ranking in the top three but have a really low ctr of just 1.6 now it's important to note that our ctr may not actually be this low since search console includes impressions made by bots i.e a rank tracker tool but regardless we could benefit from improving ctr for this query since the post incorporates our tools pretty heavily all right so the next thing we need to do is create a list of keywords we can bid on for our ad so on a filterless version of the search results report i'll set a page filter and i'll enter our ecommerce seo url slug here and from here you can filter through the queries to find relevant keywords that will be worth targeting now since search console shows average positions and won't show you every keyword you rank for you can use ahrefs site explorer completely free on websites you won't just sign up for an awt account and verify your website after you're set up go to site explorer and enter the url you want to analyze next head on over to the organic keywords report.
Step-5
here you can see the keywords the page ranks for the
position we saw it in on this date and also use these filters to quickly get
the data you need from here you can start your campaign with various ad copy combinations
run the ads for a period of time and see which one performs the best and after
you've found a winner just change your title tag and meta description to get
more clicks to your page the next thing you can do is to get backlinks by
advertising for queries with link intent some people will naturally earn links
consistently simply because they rank at the top of google and that's one of
the huge benefits to google search ads you can pay to have your page appear at the
top of google search results but you can't just advertise for any keyword and
expect it to lead to backlinks otherwise you'd burn through your budget with
little to show so the goal is to earn backlinks at a reasonable cost whatever
that might be to you and the best way to do that is to bid on quarries that
have so called link intent meaning the people searching for the query are
actually looking for resources to link to and who are these people bloggers and
journalists now finding these queries can be tough and you really won't know
the out comeuntil you've actually paid for the ads and waited for a reasonable
period oftime and there are other factors that come into play like the quality
of your content meaning if your content is poor then ads aren't a magical
formula to attract links but one type of content that we've tested with great
results are statistics pages for example we spent around twelve hundred dollars
on google ads promoting this page on seo statistics the ads actually resulted
in a good number of high quality backlinks.
Step-6
it helped us rank in position one and two for our target queries to find topics worth targeting you can use a tool like ahrefs keywords explorer and search for topics related to your industry so in our case that will be seo content marketing and blogging next go to the phrase match report finally hit the include button and search for the word statistics and now you'll see the keyword metrics for each of these queries now this only tells us about the number of monthly searches you can expect from a specific country but it doesn't affirm the fact that you can get links from it so the next thing you'll want to do is to hit the start button to see themetrics on the top 10 ranking pages and all you're really looking for is to see if the top pages have a lot of referring domains pointing at them and in the case for content marketing statistics they dobut this still doesn't tell us whether these pages are earning links on a consistent basis so to dig deeper just click on the carrot beside one ofthe top ranking urls and go to the overview page and as you can see from this graph they've had steady growth in newer ferring domains since about December 2023 and if we look at optinmonster's ranking history for that keyword you'll see that April 2023 is also around the time when they started ranking at the top of google if this strategy interests you then i highly recommend watching our full case study on how we built links to our statistics page with google ads which i'll link up in the description now these are just a few tactics that I found to be the most actionable so feel free to try them out and if you enjoyed this tutorial.