How SEO and AdWords Work Together: A Complete Guide

SEO and AdWords are two different ways to attract new customers to your website.

But, together, they can be very powerful. They will give you keyword insights, CTR improvements, and provide geographic targeting if used correctly.

This is how it works.

Keyword Insights

Keywords are the foundation of any SEO strategy. Even if you are an expert in your field, you should constantly conduct keyword research because consumers frequently look for keywords and phrases that you, as an expert, would never consider.

What matters most for high results is which keywords your target audience is looking for, not which phrases you think are most popular in a given niche as an expert.

You’ll need a keyword research tool to figure out what customers are looking for. There are a plethora of specialized (both free and paid) keyword research tools available, but Google AdWords Keyword Tool is head and shoulders above them all.

It’s simple to conduct keyword research with AdWords. You can either enter your site’s URL or some seed keywords, and the program will generate a list of suggested keywords for you automatically.

Examine the results and make a list of all of the keywords that appear to be relevant and have a reasonable worldwide search volume. Although you may wish to rank well for all of the produced keywords, it is advisable to concentrate your efforts on just a few.

The goal now is to select keywords that are simple to optimize while yet having a high search volume. These are the Google keywords with the least amount of competition. Go to Google.com and type in each of the terms you’ve chosen (one at a time).

It’s better if you search for the precise phrase. Therefore use double quotes around your term. Take note of the number of site results for each term. After you’ve gathered the ‘Number of online results for each keyword, divide the ‘Global search volume’ by the ‘Number of web results’ to get the competition ratio.

The simpler keywords to optimize are those with greater ratios. You can now begin an SEO campaign for your keywords, but as you’ll see next, it may be far more prudent to begin an AdWords campaign.

CTR Improvements

In addition to keyword research, AdWords may help you improve your CTR (Click Through Rate) using your current rankings. You could rank well for a keyword, receive a lot of traffic, and still be unable to monetize that traffic because of a poor CTR.

There could be a variety of causes for this, but an inadequate title and description could be one of them. With your current ranks, AdWords can also assist you in improving your CTR. If you run an AdWords campaign and are happy with the conversions/performance, for example, you might want to keep altering your ad title and description until you feel you have attained the maximum CTR for your keywords.

Geographic Targeting

Geotargeting is another great way to use AdWords for SEO. If you’re bidding on traffic from a variety of areas, Google Analytics can help you compare how different locations convert.

It’s only logical that conversion rates for the same term differ significantly between nations. You can put more effort into those countries if you look at Google Analytics and see which ones convert the best. You can, for example, construct local sites for these countries or target geo-specific keywords with high conversion rates.

Final Words

Not only for advertising, but AdWords is also a really useful tool. It began as a tool for advertisers, but its application is not limited to them.

For many publishers and SEO specialists, AdWords is the most valuable tool because even a small AdWords campaign may provide valuable insights and save you a lot of time and money by eliminating the need to optimize for keywords that don’t work.