Combine the powers of SEO and Google Ads

Krzysztof says: “Use your data from Google Ads to improve SEO, and use data from SEO to improve your Google Ads campaigns.

Also, mix it and blend it with AI, because now we have AI to improve it all.”

If you're not actively using Google Ads, is it worthwhile having a small campaign up and running simply to use as data to power your SEO?

“Yes. If you are not using Google Ads, you are losing a lot of data, and you are also losing clients.

When you are generating organic traffic to your website, you should fight for a conversion rate. Using remarketing in Google or Meta Ads can improve your conversion rate because you simply have more attention from your users after they leave your website.

We also see that, in long-term projects, when you are fighting for keywords in organic, you are losing the potential of getting new clients when you could use Google Ads to run for the same keywords and the same targets, and then gather some data.

When you run a Google Ad campaign, you can check the Quality Score, the CTR, and whether it's a good ad, and you can check your landing page. You can learn whether your SEO campaign might fail, or it might be much harder to gain traction, visibility, and a high position in SERPs because there's something off with one of these parameters.

With Google Ads, you can test your ideas. In SEO, you only have one landing page. It's extremely hard to do A/B testing on the same website because you want to use everything for the user base, and you don't want to risk anything. In Google Ads, it's very simple.

If you want to change a landing page but you can see both benefits and potential issues, just run a campaign in Google Ads. Do some A/B testing and check the conversion rates. Check what impact the changes have, and then decide what you are going to do based on data – not on a hunch or simply because you’re looking for something new. This is the power of Google Ads.

Also, when you are doing the process in SEO, you need to have great titles, which are mostly based on keywords and visibility, and your meta description. There were some tests recently that said, ‘Delete your meta description. Google will use a generated one, and it will rank higher. It will boost visibility.’ That's true. There are so many bad descriptions that, in some cases, it's better to delete them.

When you use Google Ads, you can make a lot of headings and test them. Which ones are dragging more clients to your website? We are looking at CTRs and conversion rates, of course, because we don't want to use clickbait for a client. We want them to convert. Then, you learn what is working: what calls to action are working, what USPs are working, and you can maybe include some numbers for this.

You aren’t just putting ideas out there and choosing them at random. You are gathering data. You will know exactly what worked, what Google tested, and which combination had the greatest results.

Also, you can make new headings using AI. Now, you can use AI to give you some ideas, add in other ideas, and teach businesses that, to make a great SEO title, they need to change something in the way that they show their products. For example, they may be lacking a USP or great calls to action, and they need to change this.

They may even need to change their business model. We might tell them to show prices that they don't want to show. However, when everyone else is showing prices and you aren’t, people will avoid your website.

It's all about gathering these ideas, testing them, and using them. Also, when we test landing pages, we can improve our headings and our content to make it more sticky. I like the word ‘sticky’ because we are not thinking about bounce rate. We want to solve the user intent and problem.

For one user, the solution will be: Add to the basket. Done. For another user, you may need to build an FAQ section and answer some questions. When you test it and get great results in your Quality Score on Google Ads, it's much easier to do organic SEO campaigns for that same landing page.”

If you have a website that's quite popular, can you just use tools like VWO or Optimizely to do those split tests to improve your landing pages?

“Other tools won’t give you access to the same data. There is a part of Google Ads that we call Ad Rank, and this ranking works on data that Google doesn't show us – it’s like a black box – but they do show us the Quality Score. It’s not like the numbers they were using for the old rankings; it's a diagnostic tool. It ranges from 0 to 10, and it has three major pillars.

The first is CTR, but it's not the CTR you read from reports. It's something called ‘predicted CTR’. Google basically tries to determine whether your ad for this keyword will get traction and higher CTRs than your competitors. It's not always about an exact number; it can be about how your ad looks compared to your competitors.

The second one is based on relevance. It looks at what you put in your ad and whether it's a solution for the user problem. For example, you can have a website about bikes, and someone is looking for ‘bikes’. That seems good, but when you sell only bikes from one brand, there can be an issue because, if we check the user intent, they want to compare a lot of bikes. Basically, you can have issues with some keywords because you don't understand exactly what the users are looking for.

Even if you only sell one brand of bike, you could explain why you only sell that brand and put strong emphasis on why it's the best brand. If you explain that on your website, you can also get higher on the third pillar: the landing page experience.

There is a lot of information about the landing page experience. What other tools are missing is that we don't have this data straight from Google. We know Google is gathering this data, and they’re using it. There has been a lot of confusion over what is true and what is not. For example, Google said they didn’t give a value to a specific domain, but we now know that it exists. We could check it for a while, but now, we can’t check it anymore.

If they have a powerful tool to assess whether or not an ad is helping the user, they probably do something similar for SEO. When you learn and you try to understand it, you'll basically do what other people are doing (usability people, conversion/optimization specialists, etc.): you will try to help your user better. That creates a holistic approach to SEO.

It's super important to understand that the aim is not visibility or being on top of the SERP. The aim is to help and convert. This is the data that will help you do that.

I also recommend that you put this data into AI. You can put in some keywords, a landing page, and some ad copy, then ask AI to analyse and explain why your Quality Score is low. You provide it with the landing page (for some landing pages, it’s easier to provide a PDF), and it will try to explain that to you.

My results with Gemini 2.5 were great. They explained some things that I hadn’t noticed. I learned how the user would see my website and what I can improve to increase the dwell time, help the user more, add new stuff to the FAQ section, and put some emphasis on things that people are paying attention to.

Google Ads gives you this data. Other tools don't have it because they are not Google.”

Would you also try to drive traffic to other pages, like discovery pages or pages on your blog, using Google Ads?

“You can use it, although you will probably have much less data because the traffic will be lower.

Often, especially in e-commerce, we drive traffic to blog pages or sites that just make content to help you understand the product. We put a lot of effort into doing this, and only using it for the SEO channel could be a waste.

Here, I recommend using Dynamic Search Ads. They use what Google already has in its index, and they automatically target those pages for matching keywords. You can learn from that. Perhaps the data will show that you should drive your traffic to a specific e-commerce category, or that driving traffic to that category was a bad idea, and an informative article would convert better.

It can even help you understand what keywords should lead to your categories, products, and main pages, and what keywords should be targeted to the news/articles side of your website. Then, if you get more conversions from them, you just put more budget into it.

Also, because it's niche, you will get very cheap conversions from that side of your website.”

How can SEO help with Google Ads?

“In a lot of ways, but mainly it's speed and how the website is organised.

We know that if your website loads faster, you get more conversions, and fewer users will go back to Google. It's super important to understand that this also works for Google Ads.

You can analyse and optimize for Core Web Vitals in Google Ads, and you have more landing pages there than in SEO.

For example, we can use a landing page that is the result of an internal search engine. Usually, that is the slowest URL on the whole website, especially for e-commerce. If you put some emphasis on it, you can learn new keywords, but you can also make this a better landing page for some filters. For example, products with options like colours and materials. Maybe you need to make those filters available for Google indexing.

If you focus on how to make good content for SEO, you'll notice that there is a structure to use, there is indexing, and you want to make it clear to read. That will work for both SEO and users, and it gains better traction in Google Ads as well. If you are improving content (not only for bots, but for users), then you will improve the same landing pages for Google Ads traffic.

For example, when we experimented with putting the TL;DR version on top of our content, it gave us much better traction in Google Ads. The Quality Score went up for the landing page experience, and we had a lower bid, so it was less money for the same traffic. Also, answering the question right away led to interaction with products or services. Small tests on how you write for good SEO can lead to much better Google Ads.

The worst scenario is when you have two different teams of people, and one team is optimizing your website for SEO, and the second team is making landing pages to convert in Google Ads. This is a very bad approach because they don't learn from each other. You can definitely make one great landing page for both, that will get great results from SEO, then optimization for Ads will give you results and instant feedback from Google, so you can improve and implement that.

That’s the basics, but SEO can do much more as well. For example, with the Dynamic Search Ads that I mentioned, and the Shopping Ads. They are based on what Google knows about the product from you. In Shopping Ads, you deliver that data via a feed, but in Dynamic Search Ads, they have to crawl your website to find it.

You can analyse your website for missing keywords and missing niches. If you sell fridges, we all know that people look for fridges by brand. However, people also look for fridges by their size. If that is not pre-determined by SEO, and the size is not emphasised in the content, you will lose out in DSA and Shopping Ads.

Only after long-term analysis of a whole cloud of keywords around your main keywords will you learn about the super-niche parameters that you may need to add. They may not even be provided by the manufacturer. For example, the phrase ‘this fridge is quiet’ is super important when users are searching for a fridge, but the manufacturer will state that parameter in decibels. You have to translate what you already have in the description into what is really being looked for by the people who want to buy a fridge.

This will help a lot with Shopping Ads and Dynamic Search Ads, and it can improve results from PMAX as well.

Ultimately, improving content for the user will improve it for Google Ads. Also, improving page speed can do brilliant things for Google Ads results.”

Will this also help you understand your user and build a better picture of who your target customer actually is?

“Exactly. Often, when people are doing keyword research, they are only thinking about keywords. They are not thinking about the persona behind those keywords.

It's very hard to get that persona. Of course, you can go into Google Analytics and try to analyse the demographics and see what core interests the people buying our stuff have. You can then use that in Google Ads or in Meta Ads, and try to target more of these segments. However, AI gives us a great opportunity.

You can give it the description of a product and ask for a persona, or describe a persona you know of, and ask, ‘What would you change in this description/content to make it better for that persona?’

You’re not using it to simply produce content to put on your website. You want to learn what the differences are and what different users look at. You might learn that, when choosing a bike, parents are all about security, but kids are all about colours.

Then, you can put all of this in your content (without damaging it; if you write only for one persona, you can damage that for other personas). If you put all of this necessary info into that content, addressing the different personas, you will get a higher Quality Score in Google Ads and more visibility in SEO.”

Krzysztof, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“Talk with your Google Ads team if you're SEO, and talk with your SEO team if you're doing Google Ads.

You need to gather data, use it, and build on this cooperation. This is synergy, not a fight, and those are two great tools that can work together. They will get better results if they work in synergy based on the data you collect.”

Krzysztof Marzec is CEO of DevaGroup. Find out more over at DevaGroup.pl.