Don’t Let PPC Cannibalize Your SEO Efforts

Working on both PPC and SEO for your business? This can be a great move until you end up cannibalizing your SEO efforts! According to experts, striking the right balance between SEO and PPC strategy is the key to maximizing efficiency and ROI.

We often come across brands who use paid search campaigns to compete with high-performing organic listings, and in turn end up spending more while gaining little additional traffic. In fact, keyword cannibalization is a real thing and it does more harm than you possibly know. It not only dilutes search performance but also inflates costs and lowers the overall marketing effectiveness.

In this blog, we’ll discuss a few warning signs of PPC cannibalization, its impact, and strategies to make sure both PPC and SEO work seamlessly without any hiccups.

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How PPC campaigns might be messing with your SEO efforts

Decreasing organic click-through rates

The first step to knowing if PPC is messing with the SEO of your site is when the website’s organic ranking remains the same but its CTRs drop. This shows that your PPC campaign may well be stealing traffic from your organic listings.

How does this happen? Well, if you are handling your PPC all by yourself, you must first understand how PPC works. Such cannibalization is usually the result of using branded or high-ranking keywords while simultaneously targeting them in PPC.

That said, AI-driven search results, ad placements, and other SERP features, together contribute to a general decline in organic CTRs, so you will have to be mindful about it too.

Increased PPC clicks without improvement in organic traffic

Here’s another thing! If your PPC is genuinely driving more traffic, but the website remains unchanged, your paid ad may well divert organic clicks away, which could have otherwise helped the site in organic search.

How would one find this out? Well, Google Analytics 4’s Traffic Acquisition Report makes it easy for businesses to identify this issue. In fact, this will allow you to gauge period-over-period traffic changes.

Decrease in online conversions while paid conversions rise

By any chance, is your website’s paid search conversion on the rise, but the overall conversions are seemingly down? Well, if you feel that this is indeed your case, you have PPC to blame – cannibalizing organic conversions. This hurts your chances of expanding your reach.

3 steps to stop PPC from hurting your SEO efforts

Handle keyword overlap

The first step to addressing this issue is to come up with the right SEO and PPC strategy. How? Well, the key is to understand keyword overlap. However, not all overlapping PPC and SEO keywords lead to cannibalization.

So, what does one do? Try to safeguard your top-ranking keywords and exclude them from the PPC ad/ campaign. To speed up the audit, filter organic search terms where the website ranks in 4th position or below – the reason being most clicks go to pages ranking in positions 1-3.

You can also sort search terms by click volume, as this will help you identify phrases that are most susceptible to cannibalization. The next step is to cross-reference the organic search terms with the Google Ads Search Terms report.

Use negative keywords

This brings us to another SEO and PPC strategy that can actually help rule out keyword cannibalization.

Let’s face it, few search terms may already be performing well organically. So, you can use negative keywords to make sure that those keywords don’t trigger the paid ad. Applying exact-match negative keywords will allow you to avoid cannibalization while still targeting any and all related peripheral phrases in the ad.

Refine brand bidding strategies

Here’s another great tip! Bidding on branded terms is almost always unnecessary. That’s because users searching for a brand intend to visit the site anyway. In other words, paying for traffic that is anyways free, isn’t a good investment.

That said, brand bidding becomes essential when your competitors start targeting your brand. Fortunately, this is always cheaper than bidding on a competitor’s brand.

At Weavers Web Solutions, we understand how PPC works and use brand exclusion lists, thus preventing wasteful spending on branded queries. This makes sure that the PPC budget is only focused on high-intent, non-branded searches. The move is particularly handy when implementing PMax campaigns.

If you run your own campaigns, you must take steps to prevent your ads from bidding on your brand. For more info, you can even check Google’s guide to handling brand exclusions.

Tweaking performance max campaigns

If you know how PPC works, you must already know how PMax ads use AI-driven automation to serve ads almost everywhere. This includes Display, Search, Discover, YouTube, Gmail, and even Maps. In fact, unlike traditional PPC ads, PMax campaigns lack detailed keyword-level control – thereby making it difficult for businesses to rule out overlap with organic rankings.

So, if you are looking to mitigate SEO cannibalization in Performance Max campaigns, you must do the following.

• Make use of negative keywords, as Google now allows it in PMax ads. Through this, you’ll be able to exclude high-performing organic keywords thus bringing down redundancy.
• If certain products on your site already perform well organically, shift your focus to different product lines/ services in the PMax. Also, since the pMax campaigns are designed for maximum exposure, you will have to go for precise targeting.

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How do we check if PPC is cannibalizing SEO?

At Weavers Web Solutions, we understand how finding the right balance between SEO and PPC strategy is the key to maximizing digital marketing ROI. While both PPC and SEO are aimed at driving traffic to your website, an unoptimized PPC ad campaign can end up cannibalizing your organic search efforts.

Our team thus analyzes potential cannibalization by pausing specific PPC ad groups and using exact-match negative keywords for high-ranking organic terms. If we notice a spike in organic traffic, CTR, and conversions after the pause – it is a clear sign that PPC was indeed competing with SEO.

That is not all! We compare performance – both before and after adjusting PPC bids on keywords – particularly when the site already ranks well on certain keywords. If somehow lowering the bids brings in steady organic traffic, chances are high that PPC was likely cannibalizing SEO. Moreover, for businesses running PMax campaigns, our team at Weavers Web Solutions, carefully uses negative keywords and refine targeting to prevent SEO cannibalization.

With over a decade of experience in all things digital marketing, we at Weavers Web Solutions specialize in crafting seamless SEO and PPC strategies. We maximize your digital marketing investments. So, if you are looking for a team that understands the delicate balance between organic and paid search – reach out to our experts! 

Allow us to make your marketing budget work smarter, not harder!