Websites that are not optimised can harm SEO. Here’s how to prevent your organic search performance from being impacted by PPC landing pages.
SEO is not an island, as any knowledgeable SEO is aware. To coordinate our marketing activities, we must collaborate with various stakeholders.
However, the partnership between SEO and PPC experts in marketing teams is one of the most underutilised.
According to my experience working with agencies and internally, cooperating with PPC experts can significantly enhance an SEO approach.
After all, using PPC and SEO tactics to expand an online business is not unusual. Any internet marketing plan must include both channels.
While SEO and PPC strategies differ in their methodologies, there are a few situations where both should work together to boost overall business success.
PPC Landing Pages
Landing pages designed expressly for PPC campaigns are one of the interfaces between PPC and SEO. Alternate PPC landing pages can be created as a beautiful approach to optimise pages for conversions rather than just search.
Look at this illustration of a landing page for PPC advertisements.
ImageSource: SpyFu
Given that it is not an SEO page, it has very little text and no schema.
ImageSource: pspdfkit.com/try
Additionally, there are just two organic keywords for which this page ranks in Semrush, one of which is a branded term.
ImageSource: SEMrush
This is an illustration of a landing page that is used for PPC but not optimised for search. Pages with a stronger emphasis on branding or unique titles, less content, more images, and clear calls to action may be needed for PPC ads.
PPC pages give a PPC manager a way out because SEOs can be very picky about their titles, keywords, content length, and other factors.
Can PPC Pages Interfere With SEO Efforts?
Yes, to answer briefly. Any page that is indexed in a search engine must be search engine optimised.
Without considering their potential effects on SEO, PPC pages might affect organic performance in two different ways:
- Cannibalization. When an SEO page already exists, and there is a PPC page version, the performance of the SEO page could be in jeopardy.
- When you create PPC landing pages for your website, you reduce the amount of content and word count on those pages, which, in the era of Google’s helpful content update, can affect how well-optimised and user-friendly those pages perform overall.
Why Have PPC Landing Pages?
Why would we need to construct a landing page specifically for PPC when a landing page can be utilised for both SEO and PPC purposes?
From a marketing perspective, PPC pages draw visitors from advertisements. As a result, the page’s content should complement the messaging of the adverts. This implies that the messaging from the PPC ad could be the most noticeable text on the website.
Therefore, your H1 can contain the same content as your PPC ad, which might say something like, “We’re the greatest in the Canadian market.” To increase the CRO of their advertising, some PPC managers even use the ad title as the H1 and the ad description as the H2.
The fact that PPC landing pages are designed to remove distractions is another problem, and the user who clicks on the advertisement is their first concern. In SEO, a search algorithm determines if a page provides the user with the most valuable uses of the content to serve both the users and the algorithm.
How to Handle PPC Pages from An SEO Standpoint
1. Noindex your PPC landing pages
The noindex tag won’t affect the effectiveness of the PPC campaign, making this the most straightforward alternative.
2. Create PPC landing pages on a subdomain
PPC landing page development on a subdomain:
- Does not require tracking across domains.
- Organise and maintain your website.
- It will only affect how well your primary site performs organically because Google regards subdomains as different domains.
3. Do both
Given all this knowledge, if you are in charge of PPC pages before they are made, you might wish to execute both. Create the PPC pages on a subdomain and set them to noindex, in other words.
What if PPC Landing Pages already exist?
If you’ve only recently begun developing a website and discovered that PPC landing pages already exist, the answer may be a little more challenging.
You must first assess the impressions and clicks certain pages receive from searches by looking at their performance statistics in Google Search Console.
If the PPC Landing Page is Not Performing
You can label the page as noindex and move it to a subdomain if it isn’t performing well in search and there is an alternative SEO page.
Instead of utilising the noindex tag on its substitute SEO page, you might attempt canonicalizing the PPC page. However, since Google can ignore the canonical tag and index both pages, this might not help fix issues with duplication or cannibalization.
Nevertheless, as this method involves minor work, you should test it first by putting correct canonicals on a few PPC landing pages to check if Google honours them.
If the PPC Landing Page is Successful & There Isn’t A Substitute SEO Page
If there is no corresponding SEO page and the PPC page is performing well in search or has the potential to perform well in search if optimised (this can be seen by looking at the number of impressions the page is receiving in GSC), you can copy the content of the PPC page to a new SEO page with an optimised URL path.
Once that page has been developed for SEO, you can redirect the current PPC page to it. Finally, to ensure that the PPC campaign is not disrupted, you might recreate the PPC page on a different URL and designate it as noindex.
Use this strategy if you want to have distinct pages for SEO and PPC, optimise the URL, and reduce the number of content optimisations on the PPC page.
Note: Use this much easier strategy if the PPC page URL is excellent and you are permitted to improve the PPC page for SEO.
If the PPC Landing Page is Successful & There Is A Substitute SEO Page
You can reroute the PPC page to the SEO page, establish a new PPC page at a different URL, and mark the existing PPC page as noindex if the PPC page is functioning well and generating some clicks from the search. There is an SEO alternative to it.
Considerations to Make Before Changes
There is a difference between the best SEO advice and what you can do in practice.
Every PPC page should be indexed and moved to a subdomain. However, this will only be possible sometimes. We must take into account the following:
The number of pages: Does the problem affect just a few or many pages? The “noindex then relocate to subdomain” strategy should be simple if you only have a few pages to manage.
Do the client’s resources allow for the creation and transfer of pages to a subdomain? If that’s not the case, you can continue with the noindex and omit this section.
Impact/Effort: Creating new pages and rerouting old PPC pages requires resources. Is the effort worthwhile? Does the projected result warrant the impact of managing the existence of PPC pages as opposed to merely making minor SEO adjustments for the PPC page?
Small businesses like yours may improve every aspect of their Search Engine Optimization with D’Marketing Agency assistance in order to rank better on search engines.
Wondering what we do? To find out more about our approach to search engine optimization, Contact D’Marketing Agency. When you’re ready, contact us so we can help with your SEO.
