Unlock Growth: Why SEO & PPC Teams Need Shared Standards

Many marketing departments continue to view SEO and PPC as adversaries competing for budget, rather than recognizing their potential as interconnected systems tackling identical performance hurdles. This outdated perspective limits growth and efficiency. In reality, the relationship between these two channels typically falls into one of three categories: a parasitic setup where one gains at the other’s expense, a commensal arrangement where one benefits without affecting the other, or a mutualistic partnership where both flourish through shared optimization and accountability. Sustainable performance improvements only emerge from mutualism, making this the essential evolution for forward-thinking marketing teams.

Mutualism directly addresses a universal challenge: marketers are seeing less traffic despite maintaining the same spending levels. Simply allowing SEO and PPC to coexist is not enough; genuine collaboration is necessary. This means establishing shared technical standards that enhance both organic visibility and paid performance. When both channels share accountability, the result is lower customer acquisition costs, quicker responses to market shifts, and durable gains that neither could achieve independently.

Practical implementation of mutualism includes nurturing a culture where experimentation and learning are prioritized. PPC can test different messages in real time, while SEO develops lasting content assets. SEO research reveals underlying search intent, which PPC can leverage immediately. Both teams gain from shared incrementality testing, sometimes called guerrilla testing. They also exchange keyword intelligence and conversion data, and adopt combined technical standards, like adjusted Core Web Vitals weightings, that align engineering work with marketing objectives. These feedback loops speed up market insight and cut down on wasted ad spend.

During periods of SEO instability, such as algorithm penalties or core updates, PPC can keep traffic flowing until organic recovery happens. Core updates often cause shifts in organic rankings and user behavior, which can also impact ad relevance and placement. It’s equally important to involve SEO experts when PPC faces a cost-per-click surge. Landing pages used only for paid campaigns influence the Core Web Vitals of the entire website, affecting Google’s assumptions about URLs with insufficient traffic for individual scoring. Slow-loading paid pages are penalized just as harshly as organic ones, damaging Quality Score and influencing bid levels.

When entering new markets, PPC should determine whether the expected results are being achieved. Establishing clear PPC benchmarks by market and country supplies SEO teams with immediate keyword and conversion data to bolster organic plans. By identifying which PPC clicks lead to sign-ups or demo requests, SEO can focus on content and keywords that demonstrate strong user intent. Sharing PPC insights helps organic search teams make more informed choices, enhance rankings, and attract better-qualified visitors.

A crucial step in unification is measuring incrementality, quantifying the extra value that PPC and SEO contribute beyond the baseline. Guerrilla testing offers a straightforward method: toggle campaigns in specific markets to observe impacts on organic conversions. A more precise approach involves pausing branded campaigns, since PPC ads on branded terms might capture conversions that would have happened organically, making paid results seem more effective and SEO less so.

For teams prepared to operate at a higher level, exploring advanced tools like Robyn, an open-source, AI-driven marketing mix modeling package, can be beneficial.

Core Web Vitals assess layout stability, rendering efficiency, and server response times, all of which influence search visibility and overall performance. Google uses these metrics to evaluate page experience. While an SEO-focused weighting system can be created, it may not fully address PPC’s Quality Score requirements or conversion optimization needs. Ad clicks often load slower than organic results due to extra steps in the ad-serving process, meaning performance standards designed for organic traffic might not accurately reflect the paid user experience. Microsoft Ads Liaison Navah Hopkins confirms that paid pages face the same penalties for slow loading as organic pages, directly affecting Quality Score and bid costs. SEO professionals should also take ownership of improving PPC-only landing pages, since these pages impact the Core Web Vitals of the entire site and influence Google’s assumptions about low-traffic URLs.

With the rise of agentic AI, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) has become a vital performance metric. INP measures how quickly a site responds to interactions from humans or AI agents. Delayed responses cause agents to abandon tasks and sites, potentially driving them to competitors. Since INP isn’t measured by synthetic testing tools like Chrome Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights, real user monitoring is necessary, though it still may not capture the full scope of AI-driven interactions.

PPC has long used Quality Score, a numeric rating based on expected click-through rate and user intent alignment, to refine landing pages and control costs. SEO lacks a similar unified metric, forcing teams to balance multiple signals without a clear framework. Creating a company-wide quality score for pages can encourage optimization and align teams while respecting channel-specific objectives. This score can be tailored to different page types, such as trial, demo, or usage pages, focusing on content that delivers the most business value. The system should be straightforward enough for SEO, PPC, engineering, and product teams to grasp and use, providing a shared language that turns distributed accountability into everyday practice. When both channels adhere to common quality standards, teams can address issues that boost both organic rankings and paid performance at the same time.

Display advertising and SEO seldom share performance metrics, even though both aim to turn impressions into engaged users. Click-per-thousand impressions (CPTI) offers a common measure for evaluating content effectiveness across paid display and organic search. For display teams, CPTI shows which creative and targeting combinations generate engagement beyond basic reach metrics. For SEO teams, applying CPTI to search impressions (via Google Search Console) highlights which pages and queries convert visibility into traffic, exposing content that ranks well but fails to attract clicks. This shared metric enables direct efficiency comparisons, for instance, if a blog post earns 50 clicks per 1,000 organic impressions while a comparable display campaign only gets 15, the discrepancy should be examined.

Reverse CPM provides another helpful perspective, measuring how long content takes to “pay for itself” by reaching a positive ROI. As generative AI alters traffic patterns, this metric will require ongoing adjustment.

The most powerful insights arise when SEO and PPC teams exchange operational intelligence instead of fighting for credit. PPC delivers fast keyword performance data to capitalize on market trends, while SEO identifies emerging search intent for PPC to target. Combined, these feedback loops generate compounded benefits.

SEO signals that PPC should notice include Google tests affecting SEO rankings and traffic, PPC can preserve visibility during organic instability. SEO keyword research uncovers search intent, new keywords, seasonal trends, and regional query variations. Long-tail insights show changing search intents after core updates, pointing to new content and format opportunities.

PPC signals that SEO should consider include identifying “dead” keywords that will never convert and are better suited for organic handling. Competitors bidding on brand keywords reveal weaknesses in brand protection. PPC data also shows which product messages, features, or offers connect most with users, guiding content strategy.

When both channels share intelligence, the insights reach beyond marketing into product and business strategy. Product managers benefit from unified search data when exploring new features. Integrating Merchant Center and Google Search Console data in BigQuery offers a solid base for ecommerce attribution. These feedback loops don’t demand costly tools, just a organizational dedication to regular cross-channel meetings where teams discuss successes, failures, and areas for joint testing.

Treat technical performance as shared infrastructure rather than channel-specific tuning. Teams that adopt unified Core Web Vitals standards, cross-channel attribution models, and systems of distributed accountability will seize opportunities that siloed approaches miss. As agentic AI becomes more prevalent and digital marketing grows increasingly intricate, a symbiotic relationship between SEO and PPC transforms from a luxury into a distinct competitive advantage.

(Source: Search Engine Land)