How to handle PPC landing pages for SEO

Every competent SEO knows that “SEO is not an island”. We need to work with different stakeholders to align our marketing efforts.

But one of the most underutilized relationships in marketing teams is between SEO and PPC specialists.

From my experience working with agencies and internally, working with PPC specialists can add tremendous value to an SEO strategy and vice versa.

After all, it’s not uncommon for an online business to use PPC and SEO strategies to grow. Both channels are essential for any online marketing strategy.

While tactics for PPC are different than SEO techniques, there are some instances where both channels should work together to improve overall business performance.

A look at PPC landing pages

One of the touchpoints between PPC and SEO is landing pages that are specifically built for PPC campaigns. Creating alternate PPC landing pages is a great way to optimize pages for conversions — not necessarily for search.

Check out this sample landing page used for PPC ads.

The page has very little text and no schema (which is not surprising since it’s not an SEO page).

And if you look at the organic keywords this site is attracting in Semrush, it only ranks for two keywords, and one of them is branded.

(Actual organic keyword counts may be higher, but expected to be branded keywords, and low rankings for non-branded keywords if there are more.)

This is an example of a landing page that is not optimized for search but is used for PPC purposes. PPC campaigns may require pages with more focus on branding or creative titles, less text, more graphics, and clear calls-to-action.

And because SEOs can get very touchy about their titles, keywords, content length, and more, PPC pages offer a PPC manager a way out.

Can PPC Pages Interfere with SEO Efforts?

The short answer is yes. Every page that is indexed in search must be optimized for search.

Building PPC pages without considering the impact they can have on SEO can hurt organic performance in two ways:

• cannibalization. If there is a PPC page version of an existing SEO page, the PPC landing page can potentially compromise the performance of its SEO counterpart.
• Creating PPC landing pages means having pages on your site with low word count and minimal content, which in the time of Google’s helpful content update can actually affect the overall performance of the site, including pages that are well optimized and users offer added value.

Why have PPC landing pages?

A landing page can be used for both SEO and PPC purposes, so why should we create a PPC landing page?

From a marketing perspective, PPC sites attract customers through ads. Therefore, the content of the page should match the message of the ads. This means the most prominent text on the page can be the same as the message used in the PPC ad.

For example, if your PPC ad says something like “We are the best in Canada,” your H1 may contain the exact same text. Some PPC managers even use the ad title as H1 and the ad description as H2 to improve the CRO of their ads.

Another problem with PPC landing pages is that they are built to eliminate distractions. They focus on getting the user who clicked on the ad to convert. With SEO, the content serves both the users and a search algorithm that decides whether this page brings the best added value for the user.

How to handle PPC pages from an SEO point of view

You can use any of the following tactics to deal with PPC landing pages on your site before they are created.

1. Mark your PPC landing pages as noindex

This is the simplest solution and the noindex tag does not affect the performance of the PPC campaign.

2. Build your PPC landing pages on a subdomain

Creating PPC landing pages on a subdomain:

• Does not require cross-domain tracking.
• Keeps your website organized.
• Doesn’t affect the organic performance of your main domain as Google treats subdomains as a separate domain.

This solution may not be 100% reliable. Google’s Danny Sullivan responded to a question about whether the helpful content update considers subdomains as part of the main domain, saying, “We tend to see subdomains separately from root domains, but that can also depend on a lot of factors.”

We tend to see subdomains separately from root domains, but it can also depend on many factors.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 18, 2022

3. Do both

Given all this information, you might want to do both when editing PPC pages before building them. In short, create the PPC pages on a subdomain and mark them as noindex.

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What if PPC landing pages already exist?

The solution can be a bit more complicated when you’ve just started working on a website and realize that PPC landing pages already exist.

First, you need to look at the performance data of these pages in Google Search Console and evaluate the impressions and clicks that these pages get from search.

If the PPC landing page is Not good performance

If the page is not performing well in search and there is an alternative SEO page alternative for it, you can just mark it as noindex and move it to a subdomain.

You can try canonicalizing the PPC page instead of using the noindex tag on your alternative SEO page. However, this may not help to resolve duplication or cannibalization issues as Google may ignore the canonical tag and index both pages.

However, since this solution requires the least amount of effort, you should test it first and try to implement the right canonicals on some PPC landing pages and see if Google executes your canonicals.

When the PPC landing page works well and there is no alternative SEO page

When the PPC page performs well in search or has the potential to perform well in search when optimized (something that can be indicated by the page getting a lot of impressions in GSC) and there is no corresponding SEO page there, you can copy the PPC page content to a new SEO page with optimized URL path.

Then you can redirect the existing PPC page to this newly created SEO page. Finally, you can rebuild the PPC page on a different URL and mark it as noindex so that the PPC campaign is not interrupted.

Use this approach when you want to have two separate pages for PPC and SEO and want the URL to be optimized and the PPC page to have fewer content optimizations.

Note: If the PPC page URL is good and you are allowed to optimize the PPC page for SEO, then by all means go for this much simpler approach.

If the PPC landing page works well and there is an alternative SEO page

If the PPC page is working well and attracting some clicks from search and there is an SEO alternative for it, you can just redirect the PPC page to the SEO page, create a new PPC page on a different URL and use it as mark noindex.

Here’s an infographic that summarizes the SEO process for dealing with PPC landing pages.

What to consider before making changes

There’s a line between ideal SEO recommendations and what you can actually implement in real life.

It will not always be possible to noindex every PPC page and move it to a subdomain. We must consider the following:

• The page number: Does the problem occur on 2-3 pages or hundreds of pages? If you’re dealing with just a few pages, you should be able to easily implement the “noindex then move to subdomain” approach.
• The backend: Does the customer have the resources to create and move pages to a subdomain? If that’s not the case, you can skip this part and stick with noindex.
• Effect/effort: It takes resources to create new pages and redirect existing PPC pages. Is it worth the effort? Does the impact of dealing with the existence of PPC pages versus just minimal SEO optimizations for the PPC page justify the expected result?

The approach in practice

For one client, a small ecommerce business, I decided to do minimal SEO tweaks to their existing PPC pages and leave them alone. I tweaked the title tag, left H1 unchanged, changed H2s where applicable, and added keywords as needed.

I chose this approach because:

• The client’s website was small. The effort will not justify the effect with only a few PPC pages.
• The existing PPC pages did not compromise or cannibalize important pages of the site.

Before running SEO recommendations for how to deal with PPC pages, you should first assess the situation. Review the data and expected results/impact before making a decision.

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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily those of Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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