As our seminar schedule shows no sign of letting up, we find ourselves being asked certain questions time and time again. Last month we dealt with the thorny issue of how SEO and PPC budget should be balanced, and this month we shall tackle the related question of “Should the same keyword research used for both PPC and SEO?”

The short answer is “it can be”, but the long answer is extended with the words “but it really shouldn’t.” To explain further, we need to understand the different purposes and restrictions.

Firstly, the number of keywords needed for each type of marketing is different. As organic search engine optimisation is largely based around utilising keywords or phrases effectively in a webpage’s copy and metatags, there are only a certain number of key phrases you can fit in each page. As a result, for each page you’re looking at three to five words or phrases mentioned a handful of times. Of course there are millions of combinations for keywords (France holiday, holiday to France, French holidays, France vacations, etc.) so you have to be selective, otherwise your copy would be written appallingly and run to several miles in length. You need to be selective and carefully pick the most relevant keywords to each page.

Pay Per Click is different. Although each advert is only 70 characters in length with an additional headline, there is no limit as to how many adverts you can create. So whatever is typed in, you can be there with an advert tailored to the keywords. If they’re using the phrase “French holiday in Paris” and “last minute Paris break” to search, you can create two different adverts to ensure that you catch the eye of each searcher. It’s time consuming but, in the long run, it will pay dividends as you only pay for the adverts that are clicked on – and the ones that are better tailored to any person’s searches (even the really specific long-tail keywords like “Tourville hotel Paris France” if you have a suitable page) are more likely to convert into sales.

However while PPC keyword research requires more keywords and phrases, research for SEO can be equally time-consuming for one simple reason: unlike PPC, where you are only competing against those companies that are proactively running PPC campaigns, when it comes to SEO you usually have to worry about competing against millions of other websites.

With Pay Per Click, your adverts will appear above others if you’re willing to pay more (I’m simplifying, but that’s broadly the case), so it doesn’t matter how many sites are competing for the phrase – it mainly comes down to the size of their wallet. SEO is different though. A search for “Spain Holiday” in Google reveals there are just shy of 13,000,000 sites appearing for that search term. Breaking into the top 10 for that is going to be tricky and time consuming (though not necessarily impossible). With SEO keyword research, it’s not just a case of picking out the keywords with the biggest number of searches – you have to assess how many sites you are competing against for them. This is done via a KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Indicator) analysis which puts a relative figure on the number of sites versus the number of competing sites.

You will almost certainly end up using some of the same phrases in both SEO and PPC (after all, it’s difficult to run a French villas site without using the phrase “villas in France”), but the route you take will be entirely different. In a nutshell, for SEO you’ll have 3 or 4 keywords or phrases per page, while for Pay Per Click you could and should have many thousands, and while you don’t have to research the competition for PPC, a KEI analysis is essential in ensuring your SEO campaign is only utilizing those keywords and phrases that will achieve your marketing objectives and have enough searches with a lower number of competing sites.

Comparing keyword research for SEO and PPC isn’t so much like comparing oranges with apples, as comparing them to pineapples.