What is the difference between search engine promotion (SEO) and contextual advertising (PPC) semantics?
- 1 Why it is important to compose a good semantic core, meaning and problems
- 2 Principles and methods of selecting keywords for SEO
- 3 Principles of selecting keywords for contextual advertising
- 4 What not to do when collecting semantics:
- 5 Margin of error and margin of error in PPC and SEO
- 6 Instead of a conclusion, the specifics of the semantics of SEO and PPC
What is a semantic core (SN)? – The answer to this question should be known to everyone who is going to engage in website promotion. SL are specially selected words and phrases that describe the activities of a portal, blog or online store as accurately as possible. A list of goods or services that he offers, item names, plus synonyms and words that are close in meaning.
And also these are the queries that potential customers enter into the search engine in order to find the products provided on the site. It is for these requests that the site must enter the TOP in order to receive targeted traffic and conversions.
All this can be conditionally attributed to the SEO core of the site itself, but there is also such a thing as “semantics for PPC advertising promotion” (Pay per click, from the English “pay per click”), for example, for Google AdWords (currently – Google Ads) or Yandex.Direct.
Despite the fact that both semantics are based on the same basis – popular key queries, there are significant differences in their finding and application. The features of grouping and selecting keywords for SEO and PPC will be discussed in this article.
Semantic core (SN) of the site
Key queries are usually divided by frequency:
- high frequency (HF);
- mid-frequency (MF);
- low frequency (LF).
Conventionally, it is believed that the more words in a query, the lower its frequency. Let’s take an example: iphone, iphone 7 and buy iphone 7 in Kharkov inexpensively. The first single-word key is HF, the second is MF, and the third is LF. The principle works – the more words – the lower the frequency.
But this is only a theory, because some tweeters search less often than woofers.
It is necessary to take into account the overall popularity of the product or service.
In addition, high-frequency queries are not always the best solution for promotion. Although such words are often driven into the search, the competition for them is high.
It will be very difficult for newcomers to the business to grow on high-frequency requests that dozens of “monsters” have been using for many years. But in terms of low frequencies, there is an opportunity to reach the TOP quite quickly. It is important to keep a balance here – on the one hand, so that the request is searched for and bought on it, on the other hand, so that the competition remains within reasonable limits.
The selection of the semantic core involves a deep analysis of words and phrases that relate to the subject of the site. To conduct it correctly, you need to know the product, language and psychology of the buyer well.
Why it is important to compose a good semantic core, meaning and problems
Here I will give the main functions of the semantic core, of course there are more of them, if I miss something, add it in the comments to the article.
Site basis
Semantics is the basis on which the site is built and developed. As you know, a good foundation determines the success of the development of a web resource, and hence the overall income of the company. If you make a mistake at the planning stage, then it will not lead to anything good.
Working with semantics is a plan for promoting and developing an online store or blog, without which SEO turns into chaos.
Semantics and competitor analysis
When selecting keywords for the core, an SEO specialist analyzes the features of competitors’ promotion for any keywords. If it turns out that the competitors in the market are serious and have come a long way, you should try to build the semantics in such a way as to find phrases that are close in meaning, but with the potential for relatively quick advancement.
For example, the keyword “tourist knife” is entered 6257 times a month, and the phrase “survival knife” is entered 9244 times. Naturally, it will be more difficult to move on the second request, despite the fact that the product is almost the same.
Accordingly, it makes sense for a young store to promote keys with a lower frequency.
SEO-specialists recommend to beware of ill-considered war for the most high-frequency queries. It makes sense to find similar words for which you will quickly promote the site to the TOP and get good search traffic.
Semantic core as a structure of a web resource
Composing the semantic core of the site, you form its skeleton. Categories, subcategories, headings and even usability become immediately clear. Menu items and promotion directions appear by themselves. A structured site is much easier to fill with content and develop. Without a clear and well-developed scheme, you will have to redo something all the time and stagnate in one place.
Search engine optimization
All phrases of the semantic core are designed for a specific text. Directly under these keywords, you will have to “sharpen” the content, it is important that it be useful, interesting and unique.
SL is a content plan according to which the site grows.
Internal links (linking)
Internal linking is based on the semantics of the site. In order for pages with articles and products to transfer their weight to categories and landing pages, you need to think through the whole structure well. Also, recently this strategy is less and less used to increase the weight, and more to improve behavioral factors (Browse rank) Effective linking contributes to the systematic growth of the site in search results.
Anchors for buying links
Semantics is necessary to create anchors (link texts) when building up the link mass. Search engines take into account not only the presence of the link itself, but also how it is composed, such as an anchor. There should always be a plan before your eyes – the core of the site and the anchor list, then it will be clear how best to form a link.
Contextual advertising
Based on the semantics of the site, contextual advertising is set up. There are many features of this process, which we will discuss further.
Read also an article on this topic in more detail: “Why does the site owner need a semantic core”
Principles and methods of selecting keywords for SEO
Keywords for a site or an online store are selected in accordance with the categories and subcategories that are presented on it. For example, an online store dealing with sewing equipment will have the following picture:
In addition to categories, there are also subcategories:
Which, in turn, contain product cards:
That is, most sites have a clear hierarchical structure, which makes it easy to search and find products and services.
At the beginning of work on the semantic core, we take the categories that will be on the resource and collect semantics from them, then subcategories.
Usually this is done in this order (assuming that the site has already been created with convenient and correct navigation):
1. The region of promotion and the search engine are determined, it depends on which service the semantics will be collected and which competitors we will analyze.
2. Manual collection (using Yandex. Wordstat, Google Keyword Planner, Key Collector, Semrush, Serpstat and other services).
3. Analyze the semantics of 5 TOP competitors (more can be, it all depends on how similar the products are). We use the keys of a competitor. There are a large number of services that automate the work of SEO specialists, I recommend paying special attention to Serpstat and Ahrefs. Then we just copy the keys and continue to work.
4. Select keys according to search hints. More often than not, using competitor keywords is not enough. After all, you need to make the semantic core better than his, so it makes sense to pay attention to Google tips. Just drive the key into the search and see what the system writes at the bottom of the issue page:
5. Cleaning. And now the semantics has been collected, now it needs to be cleaned (a very important point, because why do you need queries like “bed 2015” if it’s already 2018 in the yard),
6. Clustering. If the kernel is small, this can be done manually, but for processing several hundred or thousand words, use clusterers. This way you save time and effort. How we do this in MAVR, read the article “Query Clustering”.
Approximately according to this scheme, work is carried out on the semantic core. After we have received all the keys, we can start writing meta tags and filling categories and products with texts. At first glance, it seems that you can also take these keys and use them for advertising, but this is not so!
Principles of selecting keywords for contextual advertising
First, let’s define the terminology: “search query” ≠ “keyword”!
A search query is a word or phrase that the user enters into the search box.
A keyword is a word or phrase that we use to target a target audience in Google AdWords (Google Ads).
Those. when a user enters a search query, the Google AdWords (Google Ads) system selects the most appropriate keyword for this query in your advertising account and displays an advertisement associated with it.
The selection of keywords is made in accordance with the objectives of the advertising campaign. On the one hand, advertising must accurately answer the request (be relevant), on the other hand, it must not be trivial and “catch” a potential buyer
In general, work is carried out according to the following scheme:
- select search queries;
- find the most significant keywords based on queries;
- sort;
- check the relevance of pages;
- setting up ads.
Both when selecting keywords for SEO and for PPC, an important point is the analysis of competitors’ advertising campaigns. There are paid systems that allow you to do this quickly enough. The functionality of such programs is “sharpened” for the optimization of analytical work. The most popular ones are Serpstat, Semrush, SimilarWeb and Spywords.
Having the information when creating an advertising campaign, you will be able to take into account all the mistakes of colleagues and try not to repeat them, while taking the most effective work schemes. A few minutes and you get valuable information.
Naturally, no one has canceled the selection of keys using Yandex Wordstat, Google search results and other less automated, but useful tools.
PPC advertising participates in the auction. The better and more accurate you manage to make an ad, the less money you will spend on website promotion.
The selection of semantics for the site and PPC advertising are similar only at the stage of finding search queries.
Typical problems of PPC advertising
Inconsistency between the text on the site and the keys. When it comes to advertising, you need to choose the most relevant words so that they exactly match the needs of users. Due to errors in semantics, it happens – clicks go, the system snaps money off, there are a minimum of purchases. The result is that the campaign did not pay off. The more accurate the text on the page is written, the better for PPC. Do not forget about relevance, it has a significant impact on the price, click-through rate (CTR) and the place it occupies in the issue.
For advertising and promotional content, it is very important to set and narrow the target audience as accurately as possible. “Shooting at the squares” is justified only in the case of an unmeasured budget and a super popular product. The more accurately you get to the target audience, the more purchases and less expenses. To do this, you need to work out the semantics very carefully. Also, use Google Adwords (Google Ads) search remarketing – the RLSA system. It allows you to show ads in the search for the same audience that was already on the site.
Duplicate keys. The repetition of keywords is harmful both for the SEO of the site and for advertising. With errors in a large core and regular work with the semantics of various campaigns in one account, duplicates often occur. And as a result, keywords compete with each other and increase the cost of a click (they will divide ad impressions among themselves and “lubricate” statistics). It happens that the system demonstrates not what is needed. To avoid this, we recommend that you regularly look at key reports and search for duplicates using Google spreadsheets, excel or Ads Editor.
Careless handling of negative words. It’s bad when there are a lot of these words, but you can’t do without them. If there are not enough of them, the campaign will receive impressions for incomprehensible search queries and the site will receive irrelevant traffic. The result is unnecessary spending and rivalry of keys. This is combated with the help of a thorough analysis of the semantics, which has already been said.
Problems with DSA – dynamic key insertion in Google Ads. Before using this technology, make sure it makes sense – landing pages have a well-composed title and description , and then triple check the semantics. If dynamic insertion is incorrect, the system generates “curves” and irrelevant ads. The keys should not have typos, and the code should not have errors.
Even with a small change in the key, the results of the search results can be very different. At first glance, this seems strange, but this is how the search engine works, so check everything again before launching an ad.
What else you need to know about PPC
Here are a few of the most important factors for PPC advertising:
- The size of the budget determines the scope and capabilities of the entire event, plan and control costs to make the campaign successful;
- Find out the specifics of the target audience, because you are selling a product / service for certain people, which means you must speak their language and be understandable;
- Well-chosen semantics is the basis of the campaign, carefully check the keywords, remove those that are less popular. Click-through rate (CTR) plays an important role, with low rates, the cost of advertising increases;
- We must not forget about geo-dependent factors;
- The time and schedule for displaying ads should match the time when people buy;
- Try to accurately determine the priority phrases by which people find your products or services, select the most relevant pages on the site and advertise. How well a page matches queries has a direct impact on ad cost and campaign success. The buyer should get exactly what he expects;
- Ad exposure time factor. In Ads, it is possible to set up ad impressions evenly throughout the day or at a specific time. Beginners sometimes use a uniform display, the result is a loss of funds. This is important, for example, few people will watch commercials for industrial machinery, much less order goods at night, in the evening and after hours. They can look, but until the morning everything will be forgotten, and the click has already been made. But household goods are often bought in the evening, after coming home from work.
What not to do when collecting semantics:
1. Collection of keywords that do not match the theme of the site. Before you start collecting keywords, you need to study in detail the topics and services or products. This will help you more accurately select keywords for both advertising and SEO optimization.
2. Don’t check keywords. In addition to frequency, all keys can serve different purposes. Information requests are ranked by one, commercial ones by others. These keys need to be separated and left the ones that match your goals.
3. Promote multiple pages on the site for the same keywords. Each page should have its own group of requests for which it will be ranked in the future.
4. Trust automatic clustering. It is worth checking the clustering and finishing it by hand, since there may be inaccuracies with automatic clustering.
Margin of error and margin of error in PPC and SEO
The company’s profit directly depends on the accuracy of the advertising adjuster. Therefore, the right to make a mistake is slightly more than that of a sapper. PPC is not a cheap area to run unprofitable experiments.
The margin of error in SEO is much larger. In fact, SEO promotion is a constant experiment with keywords, percentage of entries, and content specifics. In addition, the requirements of search engines are changing, and in order for the site not to fly out of the TOP, it is not enough to keep up with the times, you need to run twice as fast. Unlike advertising, here the specialist is in constant search. Another important point is that SEO is not a quick process.
Instead of a conclusion, the specifics of the semantics of SEO and PPC
We have analyzed in sufficient detail the features of semantics for advertising and promotion in a search engine. Although SEO and PPC strategically perform similar functions – they stimulate the sale of goods and services, but at the tactical level they are different areas of promotion.
Semantics for SEO works with the widest possible range of queries and should fully cover the site’s issues. Whatever the user is looking for, whatever word form they use regarding the proposed product or service, the answer must be found in the categories, product cards or in the articles on the site. The wider the semantic core of the site and the better it is developed, the more potential buyers get into this network. And, accordingly, with good semantics and unique texts, ranking in search engines will be higher.
PPC takes not quantity, but quality. If any key is in doubt, it is easier to weed it out than to conduct an expensive experiment. PPC uses site keys with the highest frequency. Then they are analyzed, compared with competitors’ ads, and only after that they are used in campaigns. In general, the semantics for PPC are less broad but more precise.
Naturally, the question of interchangeability is not raised, since the semantic core for PPC will not be enough to properly promote the site, and the SEO core is too cumbersome and inaccurate to create advertising.
For each promotion method, it is better to use your own set of keywords.
Internet marketing expert. Head of marketing agency MAVR.
Business degree “Master of Business Administration” (MBA).