Spotting SEO Opportunity from PPC Success: PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis Playbook

In a competitive market, PPC ad optimization follows the law of diminishing returns.

You can spend a year or so maximizing your CTR with increasingly small tweaks. But eventually, the gains from those tweaks will fizzle out (leaving you with a campaign that falls short of client expectations).

In moments like this, you have two options:

1. Fight for a bigger budget—a tough request with an already frustrated client
2. Get strategic about the budget you have

This was the problem our cofounder’s agency faced years ago. And by using their PPC success as a “proof of concept” for SEO opportunity, they broke through the optimization plateau, achieved 38% yearly growth, and earned a healthy 27X ROI—all while being strategic with their client’s budget.

And it’s all thanks to what we call the PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis Playbook.

Today, we’re showing you how to use this powerful strategy for your own business or agency.

We’ll cover:

• What is the PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis?
• ROI and strategic benefits of using the playbook
• A real-life example to flesh out the strategy
• How to run your own PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis

What Is the PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis Playbook?

The PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis gives you a clear view of both the organic and CPC leads each of your landing pages is generating.

Think of it like a side-by-side PPC/SEO comparison that shows which keywords and pages are delivering results.

When yours is set up, it’ll look something like this:

It’s all clearly laid out so you can spot insights quickly and easily.

With this strategy, you can:

• Easily Identify Data-Backed SEO Opportunities – This gap analysis strategy is designed to quickly highlight areas where PPC is performing well and where SEO isn’t. You can then use that PPC success as a “proof of concept” for which SEO content to build out. It's a strategic way to get the most out of PPC and SEO working together, letting you reap the benefits of both.
• Build an SEO “Moat” Against PPC Competitors – When competitors up their PPC budget, it can have some surprisingly quick and dramatic effects on your ad performance. But if you have strong SEO content ranking for those same keywords, it can protect your search traffic by ensuring your content stays in the SERPs (even if your ads are displaced by competitors).

Plus, setting up your analysis only takes a few minutes thanks to new functionality with WhatConverts’ powerful reporting.

Example: How to Use the Gap Analysis

To help you understand how to use the PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis in your business, let’s look at an example.

Let’s say you’re an agency with a client in the roofing business. For the past year, you’ve developed and optimized several campaigns, each of which has performed well. However, your good results are now on the decline. And a budget that used to bring in 400 leads a month is now generating just 320.

Now, you know there are some very clear benefits to generating SEO content.

Benefits like:

• Cumulative growth (good content keeps earning more and more leads over time)
• Long-term stability (competitors have a hard time disrupting high organic ranking—building a “moat” for your content)
• Stronger ROI over time (one-time investment and little to no maintenance required)

The problem is you don’t want to waste any of your client’s budget. And targeting a specific set of keywords without hard data to back it up is a major risk.

That’s where the PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis comes in.

Example: Using the Playbook

You start by creating a “Leads by Landing Page” report using your WhatConverts data and building out your PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis.

It looks like this:

Immediately, you notice a glaring opportunity.

Although it isn’t generating any organic leads, your landing page targeting the keywords “emergency hail roof” is generating 30 CPC leads per month, each with an especially high quote value—$9,000 on average (which you can see thanks to WhatConverts).

As a result, you can tell that these specific keywords are exceptionally valuable because they’re great at generating highly qualified and high-value leads.

Now all you have to do to capture SEO benefits is craft content around these same keywords.

Best of all, you don’t have to risk anything.

You know these keywords work. And you know that if you invest the resources and create well-made, targeted content, you’re going to start generating high-value organic leads in no time.

But you don’t stop there.

You also use your PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis to:

• Identify other high-value keywords lacking in SEO content
• Look for PPC weak points where SEO is generating more leads
• Build a business case around increasing your client budget for SEO content (“These keywords actually generate leads, and here is the proof”)

And it’s all because you have the hard data, cleanly organized, right there in front of you.

So, how do you build your own PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis?

Before We Get Started, a Warning…

To get the most out of this strategy, you first need the right data.

And that means collecting individual lead data on:

• Lead source (Google, Bing)
• Lead medium (CPC vs. organic)
• Keywords a lead engaged with
• Landing pages a lead came from
• Whether a lead is quotable or not

On top of that, some nice-to-haves are:

• Lead value (quote value, sales value)
• Lead type (calls, forms, chats, e-commerce, etc.)

WhatConverts automatically collects all the info you need to get started with a single lead tracking script.

Plus, you can qualify and value leads manually, via a CRM integration, or automatically with Lead Intelligence. To learn more about Lead Intelligence, check out the guide below.

Lead Intelligence: The Smarter Way to Score, Qualify, & Value Your Leads

The PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis: How It’s Done

With that warning out of the way, let’s look at how you can build your own PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis.

Step 1: Head to Reports

Your strategy starts off by heading to the “Reports” tab while viewing from an individual Account or Profile level.

WhatConverts Reporting gives you a high-level look at all your lead data from a specific account (or even multiple accounts). And as an agency, you can quickly gather marketing insights that can help you fine-tune your strategy.

Next, click the “Report Library” option.

There are plenty of pre-built reports to choose from in the library—33 and counting in fact. But for today’s purposes, we’re going to click “Leads by Landing Page” right from this dropdown menu.

Step 2: Switch to the “Landing Page Path by Dimension(s)” Tab

The Leads by Landing Page report gives you an overview of the leads you brought in via your various landing pages. It also breaks down your total leads for each by the Lead Type (e.g., call, form, chat, e-commerce).

While it’s super handy right off the bat, we need to switch over to the “Landing Page Path by Dimension(s)” tab to get the data we need.

To do that, just give it a click like in the picture below.

Step 3: Choose Your Dimensions

As you can see, clicking the tab opens up a dropdown where you can select multiple dimensions to report on.

Now, what’s great about this new functionality is it gives you a lot of flexibility on what you can report on. In fact, you can choose any dimension(s) WhatConverts tracks here.

But since we’re just trying to look at leads generated by PPC vs. SEO, we’re only going to look at Source and Medium.

So click the “Select a dimension” box and scroll down (or type in) to find and select Source.

Then do the same for Medium and hit Apply.

Need some help? No problem. Get in touch with our top-rated support team and we'll walk you through it. 

Step 4: Clean Up Your Table

With your new dimensions applied, you’ll now see a table like this:

Before, the Landing Page Path report showed what types of leads each page generated. But with the extra dimensions applied, you can now view all the leads produced by each Source/Medium combination for all of your pages.

Google/organic, Google/CPC, Bing/CPC, Facebook/referral—the Source/Medium of any of your pages that generated leads are all right here.

But for now, let’s say we just want to compare Google/organic and Google/CPC.

To do that, you can filter the results to only include Google as a source.

All you have to do is:

1. Click “+ Add Filter”
2. Choose Source as the Dimension
3. Type “google” as the Expression
4. Click “Add”

Now, you’ll have a perfectly organized table that shows a beautiful report on how many Google organic and CPC leads are coming from each landing page.

Step 5 (Optional): Add in Keyword Data

Want to get even more specific on which of your marketing is generating the most value?

You can also add in keyword data into this report. That way, you can understand exactly what to target with your PPC or organic content.

All you need to do is:

1. Click the “+” sign to add another dimension
2. Scroll down to (or type in) Keyword and click

Now you can not only see which pages are generating leads. But you can also see which specific keywords are bringing them in too.

This is a great way to focus in on which keywords you should be targeting with your organic content.

Step 6: Gather Insights

As you can see, you now have a clear view of both the organic and CPC leads each of your landing pages is generating.

With it, you can pinpoint gaps in strategy for both your paid and SEO marketing efforts.

For instance, say you see a landing page is generating 29 CPC leads but 0 organic. You can then decide to allocate a percentage of the budget from that PPC campaign towards developing organic content around the same keywords.

You can also cater your PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis to any number of specific needs. Just click the “How do you want to measure it?” and choose a new metric.

For instance, you could:

• Compare the rate of organic vs. CPC lead generation for Quotable Leads
• Compare the Quote Value of leads generated from a landing page via organic vs. CPC
• Compare the total revenue generated (Sales Value) per page across organic vs. CPC leads

In the end, the PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis is the perfect way to see which keywords are generating the best leads. And that takes all the guesswork out of knowing which keywords to target with your SEO content.

Wrapping Up

There are tons of ways to use the data WhatConverts collects in order to cultivate some massively helpful marketing insights.

With the help of the PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis, you can quickly and clearly see a breakdown of leads generated organically vs. via PPC across all your targeted keywords.

And that means you can build out SEO content and tighten up your overall strategy with confidence.

Want to create your own PPC vs. SEO Gap Analysis? It all starts with your 14-day free trial of WhatConverts.