I’ve had a few instances in recent years where I’ve had to work closely with paid search teams to optimise processes and resources in chasing after particular keywords with a view to respective organic and paid success.
This has come more quickly to the fray at in-house roles in smaller, non-enterprise businesses where marketing teams frequently cross paths and collaborate and departments aren’t usually as siloed as they may be in larger companies or digital agencies.
When looking at ways in which shared insights across paid search and SEO teams can bring about value, it’s easy to immediately jump to (from a paid search perspective) “what keywords do we rank well organically for and can I omit these from my AdWords campaigns to save money”.
This approach can be haphazard in certain scenarios (brand keyword SERP authority for example), though a tailored look at this approach can help.
Flip it over, and the SEO team may want to learn what are the best performing paid search keywords in terms of click-throughs conversions to assess if there are any keywords they’re wasting their efforts on or are simply ignoring.
I won’t dwell too much on the potential scenarios at play here as they’re unique to each business and situation and there are so many subjective views on what you should be doing on SEO vs. PPC which I don’t have the credentials to indulge in.
I’m hoping that you’re here because you know what you’re assessing and what I’m sharing below may come in handy. While PPC and SEO are two distinct disciplines that target different types of users at different stages of the journey with different keyword forms, it certainly doesn’t hurt to cross and compare data once in a while.
Herewith is a data template that I’ve used recently where you can pull in some key metrics from both SEO and PPC that are easily extractable to contrast, compare and pivot to your heart’s desire:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CUq0hmPpAuP7MKHJTN4B3dO9eFH1VzVOavvTJXbxt24/edit#gid=0
The sheet features columns where you can input the following data:
- AdWords keyword
- URL
- Campaign name
- Ad group
- Country
- Clicks (over desired time period)
- Avg. CPC
- Cost (over desired time period)
- Conversion rate
- Conversions
- Cost per conversion
- Paid ranking
- Organic ranking
- Organic traffic (over desired time period)
- Organic conversions (over desired time period)
- Competitor paid search rankings (placeholder columns)
In its current form, it’s much more paid search-centric than SEO-centric, though I would most certainly encourage you to add more data points from different tools here. Think of areas such as ad copy for certain keywords compared to your SEO titles and meta descriptions and what fruits they bring.
Disclaimer: it may go without saying but metrics such as “Avg. CPC” will of course have to be pre-calculated by your PPC team prior to input. The ordering of some of these columns may not be to your taste in terms of preferred logic, so feel free to go to town. I’ve also left in some dummy data in the sheet for the purposes of exemplification.