PPC ‘Best Practices’ tips
1. Start with reviewing the account structure – campaigns, ad group, ads, bidding
2. Review brand vs non-brand – percentage share, clicks, conversions. Ensure brand search terms are actually going to brand campaigns. And non-brand to non-brand campaigns.
3. Download and analyse search term report for the last 12-16 months. Identify phrases with potential for further optimisation/testing and irrelevant phrases to go into the negative list.
4. Review the negative keyword list – negative keywords are the best defence against impressions from unqualified searches.
5. Assess ad groups, number of ads enabled per ad group, number of keywords in ads, keyword match type:
- Are there enough ad variations in the ad group to help with testing and optimisation?
- Are keyword match types used wisely and what are the results – impressions, clicks conversions
6. Review and recommend Ads extensions
- How users currently interact with the extensions
- Test new extensions relevant to the business
- Sitelink extensions to link to specific pages
- Price extensions to showcase the product with their prices
- App extensions to encourage people to download and shop through the app
- Location extension to get a physical store location
- Callout extensions to highlight specific attributes – free delivery, returns etc,
Note: Always monitor performance when introducing new extensions. Some may gain extra clicks but not always increase conversions.
7. Landing pages review:
- Review the landing page quality score
- Are the landing pages matching in the best possible way the ads?
- Are the key messages in ads also on the landing page?
- Are they good for conversions?/
- Introduce landing page A/B testing plan to identify the best performing templates. Do that for the different type of campaigns/products
8. Perform a competitor’s PPC analysis – tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Spyfu can give a good overview of competitors paid activities – ads, keywords, landing pages
- Start with the top 5 direct competitors
- Compare our keywords with theirs
- Review their ad copy, targeting, bids, landing pages for overlapping keywords. What can we do better than them to get more clicks/conversions on our ads?
- For relevant keywords, found in the research and not currently used, create new ads
9. Keyword research:
- Are we targeting the right keywords?
- Are there shifts in search volumes for the targeted keywords over time
- Are our keywords impacted by seasonality?
- Create a keyword universe file with all the relevant for the business keywords
- Add new keywords and update search volumes regularly
- Mark seasonalities
- Add keywords from the search terms reports
- Use the keywords from the competitor research
- Download queries with impressions and clicks from Google Search Console
- Check with the SEO team if they have a similar document created targeting organic traffic
- Research new keywords with tools like Semrush, Ubbersuggest, Google Keyword Planner
1. How to create a keyword universe:
10. Ad copy:
- Always test and optimise ad copy
- Apply the best performing ad copy across other ad groups
- Use clever messages when bidding on competitor’s brand names – what our product has and theirs don’t
11. Retargeting creative:
- Use creative ads, retargeting customers who visited the site but didn’t convert – create FOMO (fear of missing out), offer discounts/extended warranty, to contact the sales team for a personalises offer.
SEO ‘Best Practices’ tips
1. Review current organic performance – request access to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Create files with the most visited pages, the best-converting pages and keywords with most of the clicks.
2. If there is a rank tracking tool used internally:
- Review the ranking performance of the tracked keywords in the last 12 months?
- Any dips, gains, what could be the reason for that.
- Use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush to get an overview of top organic keywords and ranking positions
3. Benchmarking against the top competitors for the business:
- Perform a keyword gap analysis – what are the keywords they rank for, comparing them against the keywords we rank for where are the gaps, overlapping keywords etc.
4. Create a keyword universe:
- Using own keywords ( GA, GSC)
- Keywords from the keyword gap analysis
- Additional research based on the business products/services,
- Cluster the keywords into groups
- Mark the keywords based on the search intent – informational, navigational, transactional
5. Technical SEO:
- When was the last technical audit?
- Have all recommendations been implemented?
6. Perform a new technical audit:
- Crawl the site with crawling tools like Screaming frog, Sitebulb, Deep Crawl
- Checking site speed – Page Speed Insight, WebPage test
- Robots.txt and XML sitemaps review – are there important pages blocked from indexing, are all important pages in the sitemap, Are the sitemap structured well
- Mobile first indexing – is the site offer the best experience on mobile
- Canonicals, JavaScript, Backlink profile review
- Review Schema markups implemented and recommend new types
- Review site structure and internal links
- Technical on-page optimisation – image SEO, Video SEO, heading structure
- For eCommerce websites review Faceted navigation and canonicals, review the processes for out of stock and seasonal products
7. Produce a technical backlog
- Prioritise the technical task
- Identify the stakeholders required for each of the tasks – product managers, developers, Q&As
- Monitor performance after completion
8. Creating a content strategy:
- Understand the business audience
- Audit existing content
- Keyword mapping and content hubs (what could fit as evergreen content)
- How SEO activities can benefit from PPC campaigns
9. For international businesses consider also:
- Tackling content in different languages
- Geo-redirection
- Implement hreflangs