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How To Adjust The Keyword List By Analyzing Paid Traffic

A website's keyword list should be flexible and change depending on user behavior, competitor analysis, and search engine algorithm updates. Contextual advertising allows a webmaster to get data for an effective analysis of the keyword list.

How does PPC Keyword Research Differ From SEO?

Keyword research is a search for keywords and phrases using which users find your website, products, or services in search engines.

Contextual advertising is a more controllable traffic generation channel, which allows you to customize your target audience, regions, and time to display ads.
That's why you can get additional keyword data by analyzing ad campaign reports.

So what are the differences between SEO keywords used on a website, and PPC keywords, used for contextual advertising?

The main goal of an ad campaign for a commercial website is conversion; therefore, it predominantly uses transactional queries that encourage potential buyers to visit the website.

A landing page of each ad campaign should be as relevant as possible to the query, otherwise, ads will receive a Low-Quality Score and become less likely to get displayed to users. Therefore, when collecting keywords for contextual advertising, each group of phrases only combines phrases that are most relevant to the landing page.

To exclude non-target traffic, you can use negative keyword lists, set match types, etc.

Keyword lists for contextual advertising should take into account the vocabulary of potential customers. Focusing on the keyword the target audience rarely uses will have a negative impact on the effectiveness of the ad.

Therefore, adding slang is appropriate if the target audience is young people, and using industry-specific terminology is suitable for specialists in a certain field, etc.

You should take into account that the Google Keyword Planner usually shows only those queries that benefit the search engine and have high competition and price. It barely offers high-demand and low-cost-per-click phrases.

Using Google Ads To Extend Your Keyword List (The "Keywords" Report)

Google Ads has a report that collects additional words and phrases, for which the website was shown even though they were not originally included. Go to the Reports section → Search Terms:

In the "Added/Excluded" column, select a "High to low" filter to see all queries defined as "No Matches":

These are keywords that were not originally included in the ad campaign. The algorithm automatically defined them as similar in meaning to the added phrases, and also displayed the ads for these keywords.

Having analyzed these keywords, you can not only collect keywords for contextual advertising but also expand the keyword list of your website by adding these phrases to your website pages.

Analysis Of Competitors' Ads In Serpstat

You can also analyze competitors' keywords and ads using Serpstat to expand the keyword list. The service provides two reports that can be used for this purpose:

Keywords

Go to Keyword Research → PPC research → Keywords and indicate the necessary query:

In the Keyword column, you will see your competitors' PPC keywords.

You can also see their statistics: Keyword Difficulty, Volume, Cost-Per-Click, and PPC competition. Besides, from this report, you can access Ads and Landing Pages that contain the given keyword.

You can also export the Keywords report for further work on the expansion of the keyword list for your website .

Ads examples

There is another useful report in the same PPC Research section: Ad examples. Enter the query and click "Search":

In this section, you can also see the keywords used in advertising, which are grouped by ads. Such groups can be used as clusters to create optimized landing pages on the website for these search requests.

Clicking on any of the keywords will display websites that take the first ten positions in SERPs, as well as additional keyword statistics.

How SEO And PPC Affect One Another

PPC research will help to determine which keywords lead to the maximum number of conversions; this will allow you to concentrate your SEO efforts on those website pages that bring the maximum profit;
Contextual advertising attracts a clearly defined target audience. Since users land on the website relevant to their query, it leads to "good" user behavior. Such visits will have lower bounce rates, higher Pages Per Session metric, and a longer Session Duration.

These factors signal to search engines that the website is high-quality, so having a significant amount of targeted traffic from advertising can positively affect the website's rankings in organic search.

Contextual advertising paired with SEO leads to even better results if the website ranks high in the organic search results. If the website shows up in two high positions at once (organic result + ad), the user becomes even more likely to click either one of the links.

It often occurs that companies use competitor brand names in their contextual ads, and the company's official website gets lower rankings:

The relationship of SEO and PPC promotion

In this case, it is advised to have a private PPC campaign with higher rates for branded queries, so that potential customers don't go to competitors' websites.

Conclusion

Analyzing statistics from your and competitor's advertising campaigns is a great way to expand the keyword list for your website, as well as identify the queries with the highest conversion in their niche.

Using both SEO and PPC keyword research for your optimization strategy will not only allow you to increase conversion but also help to get more comprehensive statistics, improve user behavior and find a way to outperform your competitors.

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