Paid + SEO, GenAI Content, & More: Expert Answers from SEO Square 2024

min read

July 16, 2024

This year, we were proud to be a part of SEO Square 2024, a free online conference bringing together over 4,000 SEO and content marketing professionals to discuss the latest and greatest in our industry.

Botify expert Frank Vitovitch joined industry leaders Craig Harkins of Costar and Matthew O’Such of Find.co to discuss measuring SEO success for internal buy-in. In addition to the critical topic of earning buy-in (something we covered here on the Botify blog), we received a number of questions from our curious panel audience.

We’re going to cover Craig and Matt’s expert responses to the top-voted SEO questions we received at SEO Square:

How can I maximize my paid and organic efforts to benefit both?
What’s the situation with AI-generated content and ranking?
I’m a small team doing everything plus SEO. Where do I start?
With limited time and resources, how can I get all this SEO work done?
Bonus: The top thing you should do before starting your next SEO role

Q: What can my team do with our paid ad efforts that will help SEO?

In competitive markets, you need both organic and paid traffic to gain visibility with consumers. What are some ways you can use the work you’re already doing to benefit both channels?

Answer 1: Work with your paid search team to ensure you have full coverage of terms.

Working with your paid team to understand the content you’re serving and terms you’re targeting can create symbiosis between your paid and organic search efforts.

Quality Scoring can be a good indication of how well a page is optimized for an exact term: Google advises us that “a higher Quality Score means that your ad and landing page are more relevant and useful to someone searching for your keyword, compared to other advertisers.” Examining your Quality Scores can help uncover opportunities for terms you’re bidding on that aren’t well-covered by your organic site content.

Ask your team these questions:

Do we have content with organic search intent that covers the same keywords they’re bidding on?
For niche terms, are we bidding on keywords that don’t have a good organic page to support them?

These can be indications that you may need to update your content strategy, highlighting gaps and opportunities on the organic side.

Answer 2: Find gaps in your converting terminology for paid search.

Adopt a shared mindset around the text that your ads use. For example, if certain text is more successful in capturing valuable traffic via ads, those are terms you can chase from an SEO perspective.

As search moves toward intent optimization over keyword research, you can’t guarantee the terms that are working to bring consumers to your pages. It’s the opposite with paid: word for word and character for character, the terms you use in your ads are exactly what brings clicks to your pages.

Use your paid ads as a source of user testing for organic insights. Which meta descriptions and page titles will encourage clicks? It’s an easy way to access the data you need to make strategic, scalable SEO decisions for your pages.

Keep in mind a few things:

For organic, you may need to rewrite your copy to be broader or more brand-focused, rather than direct clicks to buy now.
There’s no guarantee that Google will use your titles or metas as written — at times they choose to rewrite them based on search query and intent.

Additionally, work with your paid search team on brand bidding. With branded terms, your ad text should be highly transactional:

“Sign up today and get [X]% off!”
“20% off credit purchases with [BRAND]”
“Renew your [BRAND] subscription”

Target new customers with high purchase intent. Let your organic content satisfy the top of the funnel and existing customers. Generic calls-to-action should be covered by the organic search results.

Q: Has AI-generated content been affected by ranking yet?

Answer: Consider AI-generated content the modern version of spun content.

The SEO industry already knows what happens when you spin content — that is, rewriting content from other sources to be different enough to avoid plagiarism but not unique enough to provide standout value. It’s long been considered a spammy tactic.

In many ways, search and answer engines are still trying to figure out what to do with AI-generated content. Google’s revised spam policies consider AI-generated content that has had no unique value added to fall under “scaled content abuse.” If all you’re doing is publishing straight AI-generated content at scale without providing significant value, you may be at risk for penalties.

However, as long as your content provides signals that it’s good for consumers, AI-generated content isn’t explicitly wrong to use. Try using generative AI for content in the following ways:

Add first-party data or other unique, proprietary value to any AI-written content you’ve created; never let the bulk of a page’s content be AI-generated.
Consider using AI to streamline content production at an earlier stage: use it to prepare content briefs so writers can focus on writing rather than time-consuming content prep.
Use AI tools for research to jumpstart ideation and other components of your content operations, helping identify topics and subtopics to cover.
Always make sure your content is edited and finalized by a human.

Remember: rankings are never certain, and some content especially may be sensitive or restricted based on industry (think your money, your life-related content.)

Q: As a small marketing team doing everything, SEO has been added to my responsibilities. Where should I start, and how can I prioritize?

Answer: Start with a website audit and go from there.

A website audit is always a strong place to start. You need to understand what you’re working with — its strengths and weaknesses — before you can make any effective change.

Perform your website audit by aiming to understand the following:

What can you control? Which parts of the site can you directly update, and where do you rely on others to make changes for you? Which teams are involved, what resources do you have available, and what do you need to do to prioritize and implement your optimizations?
What’s most important? Especially when you’re dealing with limited dev resources, organizing your work according to impact and effort is the best way to prioritize the most influential work first. Stack rank effort and impact, quantifying impact in revenue or potential loss. High-impact, low-effort projects win top priority, while low-impact, high-effort projects can be shelved for later.
Think at scale. When you lack resources and hours in the day, making changes that affect a broad range of site pages can have a strong impact versus one-offs: think systemic changes to templates, page types, systems, or modules that are repeated throughout the site.
Leverage your backlog for more resources. Once you’ve made the most impactful changes and have begun to see results, use your backlog as a persuasive tool to earn more resources for your work. Frame it as a trade-off: If we devote X resources to Y effort, we could see Z traffic and revenue increase.

Q: I have limited resources, influence, and time. How can I get all of this search work done?

Answer: Work with your organization’s structure to find resource overlap.

First, know that you’re not alone. Most search teams don’t have as much influence or control as they’d like. When you’re faced with a mountain of work, finite resources, and impending deadlines, the secret is to find overlap within your organization where responsibilities and resources intersect.

What does this mean, exactly? Here are a few examples:

Get work done via influence if you don’t own the right resources yourself. Look at the changes you need to make. What other teams own that area, and can you influence them? If you have a big SEO request that can be combined with basic product management, work to get your product manager on board. Develop persuasive arguments, ideally rooted in data, that show how the product will perform better if you make the change. Build optimizations into work already being done to improve the website.
Use matrix management to your advantage. If your organization uses matrix management techniques — i.e. you’re an SEO who sits on marketing, but you’re responsible for product performance — build strong, positive relationships with the product team to get them to execute for you. Product teams are naturally closer to development and engineering; instead of waiting for your engineering team to review and scope a marketing ticket, leverage your internal power through teams who are already working with the resources you need.

Bonus: Negotiate in the job interview for the resources you’ll need in an SEO role.

In addition to our top-voted questions, both Matt and Craig offered up one powerful piece of advice for ensuring you’ll get the resources you need to make an impact — and it takes place before you ever land the SEO role.

As a candidate, you have more power to negotiate than you may as a full-time employee. When you’re ready for your next SEO role, remember to use that power to negotiate for the resources you’ll need once you’re hired. Highlight the impact you can have on the business and what you need to facilitate that impact, whether that’s headcount, access to engineering, website management, or more.

If you’re not sure what kind of resources to ask for, getting an organic search mentor is a great idea. There are tons of SEO communities across industries and verticals that you can become a part of — on Slack, LinkedIn, Reddit, and more. Find the best fit for you and begin to network. Learning from one another and sharing knowledge for the betterment of all is one of the greatest strengths of the SEO industry.