Gain perspective from Google Ads

Krzysztof says: “Look at the data from another perspective. Look at Google Ads and Google Analytics data to improve your SEO.

There is a lot of stuff that Google is not telling us about how the SEO algorithm works, but we know a lot about how the auction works, the value of your ads, and how your keywords perform in your ads.

You have all this data in Google Ads, and you can also check all this data in Google Analytics. There is a lot you can take from there to make better SEO campaigns.”

If an SEO has access to Google Ads, where should they start?

“First of all, you can go big with the strategy. Google Ads will show you exact data for keywords and how they are performing. It will tell you the conversion rate and the value of conversions for exact keywords.

You will probably have the same landing page for ads and your SEO campaign, so you can just vary your ad copy and estimate that you will get very similar results. It’s the same search engine results page, just in a different place; the ad is higher, and SEO results are lower.

You can check whether your big machine of SEO is aiming for the right keywords because, if there are no sales from Google Ads for the same keywords, you will lose money aiming at them with SEO. After months of hard work and spending money on links and content, you will find that there are no sales.

Work in reverse. Choose the best keywords from a Google Ads campaign and look at how much they cost, then you have two very important pieces of data. Firstly, it gives you a budget for the SEO department and, secondly, you know that they are converting. Therefore, if you get organic traffic through them, you will also get revenue.

The second approach is to look at the quality score. In Google Ads, you can check if your campaign is performing well based on the quality score – it’s a diagnostic tool. You might be wondering whether you should get more links, improve your landing page, increase the content, or stuff more keywords into that content. In Google Ads, you can check whether there is an issue with the landing page for a particular ad or keyword.

Check the quality score, and then ask yourself why Google is saying that your landing page is bad for that particular keyword. Do some analysis. Check what’s wrong with your landing page or look at how your competitors are making their landing pages better. In Google Ads, you can see your competitors, you can see their ads, and you can see whether they are beating you.

They can beat you with money, in how much they bid, but you can also see whether they are driving more traffic. Analyse those campaigns and those landing pages. You might find that you didn’t cover some intent, some keywords, or some answers. Perhaps you can expand your FAQ section. There are a lot of things you can find, but the signal is coming from Google Ads. It’s saying that you have a low quality score for this exact keyword on this landing page.

You tend to find that it’s not that the landing page is bad. It’s not necessarily about UX; it’s about the connection with a keyword. In SEO, we make something a pillar page and put more content and keywords into it. Then we find that some are working well, and some are not. In Google Ads, you can check that.

One of the AI mechanisms that’s based on understanding our language is how Google can take your keyword and show your ads to every keyword that matches. It’s a ‘broad match’, a ‘phrase match’, or an ‘exact match’ in Google Ads, but it expands your reach and gets you more conversions.

By learning from this data, you will see similar keywords around your main keyword, and, in Google Ads, you can decide if you want to keep them or not. For SEO, this is a gold mine of ideas.

First of all, this is Google’s context. This is how Google understands your keywords, similar keywords, and connected keywords – using this graph and these clusters. Secondly, if it’s a similar keyword that Google thinks is good for ads, then maybe you should expand your content there or make another landing page for that cluster. The ideas are there.”

If your paid search team has produced a landing page that is indexed and starting to rank organically, should SEOs try to use that page and augment it?

“Landing pages that are only for a sale are very different from the pages that SEOs typically work with. Sometimes, paid campaigns have very small landing pages, with only one form asking a client to sign up.

That’s not a good approach for many SEO campaigns because you are putting your user into a place that is separated and not connected with the whole website. They go to this landing page and, if they decide not to sign up, they might want to explore your page. Then, that user would be interacting with everything you put on the site for Google to index.

When you think about the big picture, the best strategy is to have a landing page that is good for both SEO and the Google Ads team. Look at how they connect and where you have the same approach. Good usability will be a good approach. Very fast loading time and Core Web Vitals – but not fighting for points, fighting for real loading time.

Also, answering the user intent. When I put in a keyword about insurance, I want to know how much I will pay, what it will cover, whether there are extra costs, etc. The landing page should answer all these questions or lead me further down the rabbit hole to answer my questions elsewhere on the website. I should not go back to Google. Both the Google Ads team and the SEO team should aim for this, so there are a lot of things that we have in common.

The best strategy is for these specialists to operate together. Sometimes, SEO will write big descriptions to stuff more keywords. They can be bad for user experience. You have to think about how to do it in a way that won’t destroy user experience for the people who won’t interact with those descriptions.

It’s super connected, and the best strategy is to use the same landing page that’s part of a very well-designed website – in terms of navigation, menus, hyperlinks between offers and products, etc.”

How do you compare how your site is loading versus your competitors?

“You can do it manually. There are tools that will check your page speed loading time but what we always refer to is Core Web Vitals. You can check those on PageSpeed Insights from Google and Lighthouse in Google Chrome.

When you run tests to compare yourself to your competitors and search for content ideas, you probably use tools like CONTADU. They scan your competitors, analyse the top 30 websites for a keyword, and give you content ideas. Based on the same system, you should check your competitors for your most important keywords and run the same tools that you’re running for your own website on your competitors’ landing pages.

Even if you find that you are winning in the analytics, you should not think that everything’s fine. You should look at it from the perspective of a user. For example, a lot of car dealers had pages in Poland that were pre-made by the central company. They were all a little slow, so they decided that, because everyone was slow, they didn’t need to improve.

Then, other dealers made new pages based on WordPress and optimized them for speed, with better pages and better content, and they won the battle in organic. You have to be vigilant and think about how it is for the user. Sometimes it’s very easy fixes, like images that aren’t optimized. That doesn’t improve your SEO, but it will improve the results of your SEO. You will have more users, more users will stay on the website longer, and they will convert more.

You will get more budget for other SEO tasks like link building and content marketing because, from the same traffic, you are getting more conversions. The changes are very small if you only look at the Core Web Vitals numbers but, if you really focus on changing the experience of the website, you will get better results.

We worked on an e-commerce site that was very well-prepared, but they were losing traffic because users were using their internal search box to find products, and it was super slow and gave bad results. We saw, from the data in Google Analytics, that people were searching and then leaving the website.

We asked why they didn’t fix it, and they said it was because no one was using it. No one was making a purchase after using it. That’s because it was bad. We showed them how many people tried to use it, and we improved it. Improving the results from the internal search engine also helped them to make custom specialised landing pages for other campaigns.

Focus on the user and it will improve your SEO, as well as the results from your Google Ads campaigns.”

What reports in GA4 should influence SEO campaigns the most?

“I love to look at the landing page, then check the traffic that comes from Google organic and how people behave when they land on the page.

Look for pages that have a very high bounce rate or very low interaction. If you find those pages, you then need to ask why people left that page. If your average bounce rate is 50% but you have a landing page, blog post, or some big piece of content that has a bounce rate of 80-90%, something is wrong.

Sometimes it’s about choosing the right keywords. Sometimes you forgot to include some important improvements, like a short index of what is in the larger piece or putting videos higher on the page. Making it more interactive, and not only having big chunks of text, will keep people on the website, they will go further, and they’re more likely to convert. That’s the first test.

You can also check something that is much more important than bounce rate, which is conversion rate, or the value from transactions if you’re in e-commerce.

Another super cool test I like to do is what I call ‘Checking the Dust Zone’, which you can do in a crawler like Sitebulb. You export and connect data from Search Console, Google Analytics 4, and the crawl of your website. Then, you can see two things. First, you will find orphan pages that are not reported by the crawler. The crawler does not check orphan pages but, if you give it data from Analytics and Google Search Console, it will find them.

The second thing you will find is the pages that don’t have any SEO traffic. That’s what I call the ‘Dust Zone’. No one is visiting them from Google organically, even if they are in some campaigns.

The question you have to ask is, what happened? What went wrong? Sometimes the answers are easy: they are not indexed, you need more link popularity, or the content is bad. Sometimes there is some error like a noindex parameter, you forgot to include H1s and titles, or some canonicals have been made very badly. If you are paying attention to your technical SEO, the answers will not be so easy to find.

You might have 10,000 products and the report shows that 80% of the traffic is going to only 20% of those. Then you have to check what’s going on.

You have to really aim for a long tail approach. If you check those reports, you will see if you have an issue or if you have really got the long tail. When you have thousands of products ranking and getting traffic, that’s what you are aiming for.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Stop using Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets to make reports. We have great tools for this. Google Analytics 4 can be overwhelming, but you can make your reports there, and you can keep them. You invest your time once, and then you get great reports.

If you want to have good conversations with your client about data, you should consider Google Looker Studio. Looker Studio allows you to make reports based on many data sources. For example, you can put in data from Google Search Console and Analytics, and you can see conversion rate and conversion costs from Google Ads and SEO. You can estimate what percentage is brand traffic and put everything in one nice-to-read report. It’s also interactive.

You also don’t have to send a report every month. A lot of people struggle to create reports every month. It’s better to call clients. Read the report yourself and then talk about what you can do in the month. Focus on strategy, focus on operations, and talk about how to get another niche or new traffic.

Stop talking about data and reading sad reports. Cut that out and use tools to automate it.”

Krzysztof Marzec is CEO of Deva Group, and you can find him over at DevaGroup.pl.