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How to handle PPC landing pages for SEO
Every competent SEO knows that “SEO is not an island.” We need to work with different stakeholders to align our marketing efforts. But one of the most underutilized relationships in marketing teams is between SEO and PPC specialists. From my experience working with agencies and in-house, collaborating with PPC specialists can bring tremendous value to an SEO strategy and vice versa.
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After all, it is not uncommon for an online business to leverage PPC and SEO strategies to grow. Both channels are essential for any online marketing strategy. While the tactics for PPC are different than SEO techniques, there are a few cases where both channels should collaborate to improve overall business performance. A look at PPC landing pages One of the touchpoints between PPC and SEO is landing pages created specifically for PPC campaigns.
Creating alternative PPC landing pages is a great way to optimize pages for conversions – and not necessarily for search. Take a look at this sample landing page used for PPC ads. The page has very little text and no schema (which isn’t surprising since it’s not an SEO page). And if you look at the organic keywords this page is attracting in Semrush, it’s only ranking for two keywords, and one of them is branded. (The actual number of organic keywords may be higher, but it’s expected to be branded, and low rankings on non-branded keywords, if there are more.)
This is an example of a landing page not optimized for search but utilized for PPC purposes. PPC campaigns may require pages with more focus on branding or creative titles, less text, more graphics and clear calls to action.
And because SEOs can get really touchy about their titles, keywords, length of content, and more, PPC pages offer a PPC manager a way out. Can PPC pages interfere with SEO efforts? The short answer is yes. Any page that is indexed in search needs to be optimized for search. Creating PPC pages without taking into consideration the impact they can have on SEO can interfere with organic performance in two ways: Cannibalization.
When there’s a PPC page version of an existing SEO page, the PPC landing page can potentially jeopardize the performance of its counterpart SEO page. Creating PPC landing pages means having pages on your website with low word count and minimal content, which in the time of Google’s helpful content update, can actually impact the overall performance of the website, including pages that are well optimized and provide value to the users. Why have PPC landing pages? A landing page can be used for both SEO and PPC purposes, so why would we need to create a PPC landing page? From a marketing standpoint, PPC pages attract customers from ads. Thus, the content on the page should align with the ads’ messaging.
This means that the most prominent text on the page can be the same as the messaging used in the PPC ad. So, for example, if your PPC ad says something like, “We’re the best in the Canadian market,” your H1 can be the exact same text. Some PPC managers even use the ad title as the H1 and the ad description as the H2 to improve the CRO of their ads. Another issue with PPC landing pages is that they are built to eliminate distractions.
They are focused on getting the user that clicked on the ad to convert. In SEO, the content serves both the users and a search algorithm that decides whether this page brings the best value to the user. How to handle PPC pages from an SEO standpoint You can do any of the following tactics to deal with PPC landing pages on your website before they are created.
1. Mark your PPC landing pages as noindex This is the simplest solution and the noindex tag will not impact the PPC campaign performance.
2. Create your PPC landing pages on a subdomain Creating PPC landing pages on a subdomain: Does not require cross-domain tracking.
Keeps your website organized. Will not impact the organic performance of your main domain as Google treats subdomains as a separate domain. This solution may not be 100% reliable. Google’s Danny Sullivan answered a question on whether the helpful content update considers subdomains as part of the main domains saying, “We tend to see subdomains apart from root domains but it can also depend on many factors.”
3. Do both Given all of this information, you may want to do both if you are handling PPC pages before they are created. In short, create the PPC pages on a subdomain and mark them as noindex. Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on.
What if PPC landing pages already exist? The solution can be a bit more complicated if you just started working on a website and found that PPC landing pages already exist. First, you'll need to look into the performance data of those pages in Google Search Console and evaluate the impressions and clicks those pages are getting from search.
If the PPC landing page is not performing well If the page is not performing well in search and there's an alternative SEO page alternative for it, then you can just mark it as noindex and move it to a subdomain.
You can try canonicalizing the PPC page instead of using the noindex tag on its alternative SEO page. However, this may not help resolve duplication or cannibalization issues, as Google can ignore the canonical tag and choose to index both pages. That said, because this solution requires the least effort, you may want to test it first and try implementing proper canonicals on a few PPC landing pages and see whether Google executes your canonicals.
If the PPC landing page is performing well and there's no alternative SEO page If the PPC page is performing well in search or has the potential of performing well in search if optimized (something that can be indicated by seeing that the page is getting plenty of impressions in GSC) and there's no corresponding SEO page, you can copy the content of the PPC page to a new SEO page with an optimized URL path.
Then you can redirect the existing PPC page to that newly created SEO page. Finally, you can re-create the PPC page on another URL and mark it as noindex, so the PPC campaign doesn't get interrupted. Use this approach if you want to have two separate pages for PPC and SEO and want the URL to be optimized, and the PPC page will have fewer content optimizations. Note: If the PPC page URL is good, and you are allowed to optimize the PPC page for SEO, then definitely go with this much simpler approach.
If the PPC landing page is performing well and there is an alternative SEO page If the PPC page is performing well and attracting some clicks from search and there's an SEO alternative for it, you can simply redirect the PPC page to the SEO page, create a new PPC page on a different URL and mark it as noindex. Here's an infographic summarizing the SEO process for handling PPC landing pages. What to consider before making changes There's a line between ideal SEO recommendations and what you can actually execute in real life.
It won't always be feasible to noindex every PPC page and move it to a subdomain. We need to consider the following: The number of pages: Does the issue occur on 2-3 pages or hundreds of pages? If you're only dealing with a few pages, you should be easily able to implement “noindex then move to subdomain” approach.
The backend: Does the client have the resources to create and move pages to a subdomain? If that's not the case, you can skip this part and stick to the noindex. Impact/effort: It takes resources to create new pages and redirect existing PPC pages.
Is it worth the effort? Does the impact of handling the existence of PPC pages vs. just doing minimal SEO tweaks for the PPC page justify the expected outcome? The approach in practice For one client, a small ecommerce business, I decided to do minimal SEO tweaks to their existing PPC pages and let them be.
I optimized the title tag, didn't change the H1, changed H2s where applicable, and added keywords when needed. I decided to use this approach because: The client's website was small. The effort will not justify the impact with only a few PPC pages.
The existing PPC pages were not jeopardizing or cannibalizing any important pages on the website. Before rushing to execute SEO recommendations for handling PPC pages, evaluate the situation first. Look at the data and the expected outcome/impact before deciding. Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Staff authors are listed here. New on Search Engine Land About The Author Sara Taher is a Canadian based SEO consultant with over 8 years experience in the field. She is most known for her SEO tips and riddles that she shares on her Linkedin account. You can sign up for her newsletter & check out her blog here.
How to build an enterprise SEO team
In 2022, 10.03 million viewers tuned in to watch the NFL Draft. Why? Because everyone knows that winning is a result of teamwork. The NFL Draft supplies a team with talent that has the potential to reshape teams to win more. Coaches pick the talent that fits their style of play and improves the team positively.
If you’re an enterprise SEO Director, think of yourself as a coach. You’re building the right SEO team that will not only help you scale but will fit within your company’s org structure. Today’s enterprise SEO teams are different from teams of the past: They’re more agile, technical, cross-functional and efficient.
That means enterprise SEO teams must learn to play nice in the same sandbox as the dev, editorial and product marketing teams. Enterprise SEO teams need to overcome the pitfalls of competing priorities and “us versus them” thinking to establish a shared mindset to create the best customer experience.
As Ren Lacerda, Head of SEO at Carmax, shared with me: “The company recognized the strategic value of SEO – beyond the clicks and sales it produces – and we are fortunate to count on significant resources. The soul of our approach is that we believe that to win in SEO is a matter of ‘death by a thousand cuts,’ where it’s rarely one single action that produces results,
but the collection of many, many actions focused on creating the best customer experience on the SERPs we are targeting that will bring us the most market share on Google SERPs.” With my 12+ years of experience scaling enterprise SEO teams, plus the 24 SEO leads I surveyed, here is the insight into how I and others build enterprise SEO teams.
How many people do you have on your enterprise SEO team? The answer depends on your enterprise SEO brand portfolio. For example, when I worked with Bloomin Brands with 5+ brands, each brand had its own product lead who would create pods of channel-specific experts.
So, there were only two people on the SEO team that supported all the brands with heavy dependence on agencies. However, when I worked with Hearst Magazine, we had 10 people with one SEO expert for every 1-3 brands or markets. You’ve got to tread lightly, though.
As Ramesh Singh, Head of SEO at Great Learning, shared: “There is a lot of pressure on the in-house SEO team to perform and contribute to the overall revenue.
If you do not have enough resources in your team to manage different aspects, you will fall short of achieving the goals.” When I asked the 24 SEO Directors, VPs and Heads, here’s the response: 12 out of 24 shared their SEO team consists of 5-10 people. 2 out of the 24 shared their SEO team consists of 10-15 people.
21 out of 24 said they have a budget to expand their SEO team next year. My general rule of thumb is for every three brands or websites, one SEO person to lead the enterprise SEO strategy. What job title do you hire for first on your enterprise SEO team? Martin MacDonald, Founder of MOGMedia, and previous Head of SEO ; Content Marketing at Expedia Group, Orbitz Worldwide, shared how he chose his first SEO hire. “I built internal teams for clients as a service,
team structure, process and its nuances are specialist subjects of mine. While no two situations are unique, typically, the first senior SEO member will, by necessity, be at a strategist level but must be able to get their hands dirty and do some execution work. A general-purpose non-specialist SEO executive is typically the second hire to share the workload with the strategist.
Still, from there on, it’s totally unique: based on existing company structure, resources, and availability.” Based on my survey of 24 enterprise SEO leaders: 11 out of 24 said they would hire an SEO Generalist for their first SEO role. 8 out of 24 said they would hire a Content SEO Specialist for their first SEO.
Only 5 out of 24 said they would hire a Technical SEO Specialist. Here is typically how you see enterprise SEO leads kick off hiring. Again, it depends on your company’s business model and the skillset gaps you’re working with. Before hiring, I recommend you review this SEO Skill Gap Analysis for each team member.
You can use this to help create a business use case for the additional headcount. Should SEO sit under Product or Marketing? Before I dive into the enterprise SEO team org structure, it’s important to think about where SEO sits within the overall company org chart. In my experience, enterprise SEO teams often rotate between Sales, Product Marketing, and Marketing.
Personally, I have not seen success when SEO teams sit under Sales or Product Marketing. Here’s why. Sales teams are driven by forecasts and hard numbers that are then driven by leads or revenue. While SEO is meant to drive revenue, SEO professionals don’t have control over what happens after a person lands on the website.
SEO teams choose the wrong tactics to go after just to hit revenue goals. Product Marketing teams are driven by voice, tone, and branding of the product for the best customer experience. While SEO teams focus on the same goals, SEO professionals can overlook essential tactics. David Bell, CEO at Previsible.io, breaks it down for us here: “The most effective ways I’ve seen teams build are by category or expertise.
This depends on what type of business we’re talking about and whether SEO is under Marketing or Product in the org structure. With websites over a million pages, the likelihood of SEO sitting within the product is greater.
If SEO is under marketing, you’ll most often see the team broken up by category, i.e., an SEO for all furniture and another for all electronics on an e-commerce site. This also may be a good fit for publishers broken out by content category.
Under this model, those SEOs will be focused mostly on content SEO and on-page of their respective category. When SEO is under Product, the focus is more on hiring for expertise or discipline. The main roles under this model are thought leader/strategist, lead SEO, and analyst roles – generally in that order. You’d expect the people you hire there to have experience in technical and content SEO, but it varies depending on the business needs.
These SEOs will likely have to work across categories or properties as the website is large enough that it’s needed.” Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on. 4 examples of enterprise SEO team org structures When thinking about my team structure, I start with my goals and then build for the outcome. Also, you want your team structure to complement the business model.
1. Hierarchical structure Here's an example of an enterprise SEO team org following the traditional hierarchy approach. These hierarchical structures (also known as tall or vertical team structures) are an older example of the corporate food chain. This approach feeds into the "us vs. them" mentality that SEO Directors and VPs set out to avoid.
These structures cause silos and bureaucracy. With SEO, you need to be fast and agile. I don't recommend this org structure. 2. Pod structure Pod structures are popular with Product Marketing and DevOps teams because it creates a classic cross-functional team approach to tackling campaigns and tasks. However, for pod structures to work on an SEO team, you need a bigger team size. Tory Gray, CEO of The Gray Dot Company, shared that she was "[a] Growth Product Manager, which encompassed SEO (embedded on an OBT, or objective-based team.
I was on the "growth" team alongside resources from the product, email, social, etc. This was cool but ultimately hard to pull off for an org of our size (relatively small)." Here is an example of a pod SEO team org structure I've seen in the past at enterprise companies.
Each pod has complementary roles: Lead: Responsible for driving the big-picture strategy, planning, and coordinating between teams. This typically sits with the SEO Manager or SEO Director in coordination with cross-functional managers (i.e., Product Marketing Manager). Producers: The artist behind the quality execution and creativity.
This sits with the Specialists with review from the Managers in partnership with the copywriters, engineers, and designers. Analysts: The analytical mindset ensures measurement is in place for before and after results. This sits with the Specialists and Managers for review.
This is an approach that Andrew Edgar, Director of SEO at Technology Advice, takes with his team. Edgar shares: "Our SEO team works with engineering, creative, and editorial. For engineering, our team utilizes Jira tickets to submit issues/initiatives.
As an advocate of SEO and my team, I meet with the Director of our engineering team to ensure our initiatives see the light of day. For editorial, my team meets with the managing editor of the specific site at least once a month. During these meetings, they discuss keywords, topics, and initiatives. This is a collaborative meeting of equals.
Both roles are trying to improve the visibility of content. The SEO team will bring ideas for new topics, content optimizations, and refreshes and report on the keyword ranking of key terms. The editor, in turn, will give insight into audience needs and future potential topics that need keyword research.
For creative, our team will work alongside editorial and engineering to design pages or key assets. We do this by supporting editorial with creative briefs." Here is an example of how this pod SEO org structure might work across teams.
Quincy Smith, Head of SEO at Springboard, has a product manager on his team to take the coordination off the SEO leads plate. Smith shares: "Every team has an intake form that links to their Asana board so any person or team can submit requests. In addition, each team has a dedicated Slack channel for quicker FAQs.
For projects that span teams, we assign a PM who manages everything in terms of progress and updates. If the project is ongoing (like content and SEO), then we share a dedicated workspace and Slack channel for regular communication." Also, enterprise SEO teams often act like an in-house SEO agency. Pod structures are common at SEO agencies, as Jessica James, Head of SEO Operations at BuiltVisibile, shared. "We have separate DPR and content teams who work alongside SEO.
The SEO team is mainly responsible for strategy and technical. We have a pod structure, with 3 pods, each led by a senior consultant, who line manages 2-3 consultants, each with their own executive or senior executive supporting their accounts. Depending on what's planned for each account, the pods collaborate to support one another across all accounts.
Each consultant leads 2-3 accounts under the supervision of their senior consultant. They are the strategic and technical lead, with executives in the account team responsible for much of the execution and the consultants focusing more on overarching strategy.
Senior consultants are responsible for upskilling and mentoring their pods, supporting sales, product development and innovation, and marketing." 3. Brand, product, vertical or market structure Structuring your enterprise SEO team by brand, product or vertical is the most common approach across companies.
For instance, Kyle Faber, Head of SEO at Snark Digital, shared: "As Director of SEO at a major publisher, I built the team based on publication/brand, so there were SEO managers for each brand that partnered with editorial and an SEO analyst who worked alongside me with engineering/product on technical SEO." Here is an example of what a brand, product, vertical or market SEO team org structure might look like.
4. Hybrid structure The hybrid enterprise SEO team structure combines the best of multiple org structures for the "dream team." The hybrid approach is my preferred method because let's face it, most enterprise SEO teams are reliant on shared resources. Eli Schwartz, Growth Advisor at Product-Led SEO, supports this hybrid angle as he explained: "I hire SEO professionals that function as PMs for their business units, and they are responsible for all aspects of the product which will include eng decision, product, design, and marketing communication.
When an SEO PM functions as a PM, they operate as a hub with eng, dev, editorial, and creative all as spokes whose time needs to be managed and allocated." I've never had the budget or flexibility to scale a team larger than 3-5 team members. So, enterprise SEO leads are tied to hiring SEO Managers as generalists that support cross-functional teams.
Here is how I create a hybrid org structure for my enterprise SEO teams. This approach allows your SEO team to be fully integrated across departments. Mordy Oberstein, Head of SEO Branding at Wix, takes a similar approach. "We heavily integrate with multiple product teams (mostly SEO, of course, and our performance team, but it can vary to consulting with the ecommerce product team, accessibility team, etc.). We offer direct feedback to anyone from the devs to the UX writers around the needs of SEOs for the product.
At the same time, we're incredibly involved on the editorial side. We set the content guidelines around SEO topics so that when whatever team covers SEO as a topic, they understand how present the material. To that, we're constantly reviewing and editing all sorts of content related to SEO." It's vital that an SEO team member participates in all conversations related to the brand and digital landscape. Casie Gillette, Sr. Director,
Digital Marketing at KoMarketing, shares how this works: "Using public relations as an example, we will coordinate with them on byline pitching. As part of our link building process, we may try to secure guest posts, so it's important we aren't stepping on their toes or duplicating efforts.
This may entail shared publication workbooks, monthly meetings, and byline reviews." Why it's important to make a business use case for more SEO team members When I connected with Laura Mathisen, Head of SEO at T-Mobile, she shared how important it is to make a business use case for the C-suite executives to help scale your team.
"When I started at T-Mobile in 2019, there was one SEO professional, now we have 10 SEO team members. What we did:1. Built a business case and vision of where we were and where we wanted the team to be in the next 3 years and evangelized it to senior leadership.2. Hired some of the best SEO professionals in the country focused both on technical and content SEO (did not require a degree and opened up hiring nationwide).
3. Spent time educating from the C-suite down to the business managers on the value of SEO.4. Began building process and governance." Deanna Baldwin, Senior SEO Manager at DSW with previous experience at HSN, Chewy, and Royal Caribbean, went through the same experience. She shared: "I built our first dedicated SEO team.
There were many considerations in determining my team structure: covering foundational SEO areas, setting us up to target our growth opportunities, and factoring in our company's overarching goals, strategies, and roadmaps.
This led to my team consisting of an SEO analyst, technical SEO lead, and SEO content lead." In my previous article on how to budget for enterprise SEO, I shared this budget ask request template to scale SEO team members. So, how does your enterprise SEO team work with agencies? I started working at agencies, and I'm incredibly grateful for it because I learned so much.
The energy, pace, intelligence, and hands-on experience SEO professionals get from working at agencies are not measurable. If you're leading an enterprise SEO team with the budget to hire an agency, I highly recommend hiring an agency.
Agencies can help fill the void for any skill gaps and improve the capacity your in-house enterprise SEO team can execute. That's how Micah Fisher-Kirshner, VP of SEO and Content at Turn/RiverCaptial with previous experiences as the only SEO person at Zendesk, leans on SEO agencies. He stated: "Mostly I used external agencies for point service solutions, e.g., content promotion, content scaling given the lack of internal resources and need for speed on the SEO projects. I gave them directions for the goals, what I expected from them, how often we needed to check in, and where things were internally with the work we had." When I worked with DeepCrawl's professional services, we depended on DeepCrawl for their technical SEO education. Jamie Indigo, Senior Technical SEO at DeepCrawl, shared how they do it.
"We have client meetings where we present findings from the latest crawls. We have training sessions where we work with teaching agencies. We have clients who outsource their dev work to an external agency, so then it's everyone on a call working it out." Or, you can utilize your SEO agency for lower-level projects like Laura Mathisen, Head of SEO at T-Mobile.
"The in-house team focuses the most on strategy, planning, execution, and building relationships cross-functionally to get things done. The agency usually works on lower-level projects, including keyword research and audits. They are essential, though, especially since we've lost two folks recently. They can step in and fill the gap while we are on a hiring pause since we use a retainer."
To be a world-class enterprise SEO team, you need team players The key to building a world-class enterprise SEO team is you need team players to work across departments. The reality is until enterprise companies increase the budget to hire more SEO professionals, most enterprise SEO teams will be made up of generalists that can communicate SEO best practices to other teams.
So, as the coach leading the way, set your team up for success with documentation and establish trust for execution. As one person, you're not going to be in every meeting. And your team doesn't want you constantly watching you for instructions.
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