Technical SEO tends to get filed under "organic only," but the same fundamentals, page speed, mobile usability, clean site structure, directly influence PPC performance too, through Quality Score and landing page experience. A slow, poorly structured site quietly taxes both channels at once.
The overlap most teams miss
Google Ads' Quality Score factors in expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. That last component is essentially a technical SEO audit run against your paid landing pages specifically: load time, mobile friendliness, and content relevance to the ad. Fix these and you often see a direct reduction in cost-per-click, independent of any bid changes
A practical starting checklist
- Core Web Vitals: particularly Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift, both of which affect user experience and, increasingly, ranking signals
- Mobile rendering: test your actual landing pages on a mid-range Android device, not just desktop Chrome dev tools
- Redirect chains: multiple redirects before a page loads slow everything down and confuse crawlers
- Duplicate or thin landing pages: a common cause of both poor organic rankings and low Quality Scores on the paid side
Why this matters for agency selection
If you're comparing agencies offering integrated SEO and PPC and paid social strategies, ask specifically how they handle landing page technical audits, not just ad copy and bidding. The stronger integrated agencies in the UK market treat this as one workstream rather than two separate audits, a pattern we've noted among the agencies covered in our review of firms excelling across SEO and PPC.
Running your own audit
Most of this can be checked for free using Google's PageSpeed Insights and Search Console's Core Web Vitals report. Look for pages that serve both organic and paid traffic first, improvements there have the most immediate, measurable impact across both channels.
Our SEO services include technical audits as a baseline for every engagement, and our portfolio includes examples where technical fixes alone moved both rankings and Quality Score. Contact us for a free technical scan of your top landing pages.