#14: What content people need to know about paid search

In this issue: How paid search can help the organic team, and vice versa

👋 Hey, it’s the Ercule newsletter! This newsletter is designed to help content marketers and writers make sense of content analytics and SEO.

And thanks to our friends at Operator, a growth consultancy and Ercule partner, for working with us on this one.

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Paid search is organic search plus one additional ranking factor: money.

The ranking algorithm for ads takes into account very similar factors to those used for organic rankings, like

• Readability
• Relevance
• Landing page UX

…plus

• How much you’re willing to bid for a certain keyword

Google rewards quality content by making the price of a click cheaper, and by showing your ads more often.

So paid search still requires great writers and content marketers.

🧉 How paid search can help content marketers

Paid campaigns result in a lot of really useful data about what’s resonating with users, and what isn’t. The paid performance team knows how to extract and parse that data.

For example, Google Ads gives a “search terms report” (literally what it is called) that shows exactly how many impressions, clicks and conversions resulted from each particular search term.

And that’s just the beginning. Paid search provides data such as:

• Which offers are working, and which aren’t
• Exactly how competitive you are for various topics
• Quality of page UX and the conversion experience

And they could share it with you… but you gotta ask.

So it’s time to get friendly with the folks in Paid.

🍹 How content marketers can help the paid team

Useful, engaging content can dramatically improve acquisition costs (lowering click prices, increasing conversion rate). The inverse is also true: poor content requires higher bids.

So there are a lot of opportunities for you to help out the paid team – endearing yourself to them, and expanding the audience for your content in the process!

• Improving landing pages (for paid ads)
• Crafting offers for paid acquisitions
• Generating content for lead capture offers
• Aligning content (to build brand quality)

🏄 What you can do

Forge an alliance. Start with hello. Talk to the person who is in charge of your team’s paid acquisition campaigns. There’s probably some ways that you two can partner up for mutual benefit.

Here are some questions you might use to nudge the dialogue along:

• How is Google Ads rating the quality of our landing pages? (Page optimization)

• What ad headlines and descriptions perform best in paid ad copy? (Conversion)

• Which audience segments (age, gender, household income, parental status) perform the best? (Persona targeting)

• Are there new categories that you’re thinking about testing on your roadmap that we should consider exploring on the organic side as well? (Keyword alignment)

• Where is there misalignment between a user’s search query and our messaging (Ad relevance, Quality score)

• Are there any holidays or promotions coming up that you need support developing content for? (Content strategy)

Remember: you’ve got a skill set that can make paid search a more efficient channel, and the brand more successful overall. Same goes for their data.

You belong in this conversation.

Feel free to schedule office hours to look at this together!

xoxo, Ercule