This post will be most helpful for those in the healthcare industry, as we take a look at where Google Scholar is showing up in the top five or top ten results. Then use that information to say, “if Google is showing Google scholar in the top few, that means that people might also be searching for parts of journals and then clicking on ads when that’s not what we want”.

TL;DR: Combine SEO and PPC data to identify Google scholar snippets that give intel into user intent when searching for a specific query.

Here are some examples to just give you a feel on why you might want to take your organic rank data, join it to your paid data and start saving some money in your digital marketing budget.

Sample Google Search: “Leukemia proton beam therapy”

I don’t know anything about this query, but I do know that Google is listing Google Scholar as a top result.

That doesn’t mean that these are not worth targeting for people in paid, but it does tell you that Google has learned over time that some people searching for that are looking for scholarly articles. They’re putting that right up here at the top. So that’s a pretty strong clue.

Sample Search: “CBT for depressed children”

This is an actual query somebody typed in. Again, I get to see these scholarly articles at the top.

It might make me think differently about my strategy on what I’m going to negate.

Sample Google Search: “Hospice nurses and addiction”

I want to call this one out scholarly articles for hospice nurses and addiction.

So what I thought was really interesting about this query is look at the ad, it’s specifically for people that healthcare workers who are facing addiction issues and the page itself is really about health care professionals.

This is the kind of scenario where you really want to harness this data to help you to target people better, specific to things that matter to them

Sample Google Search: “low dose mammography”

Google believes that scholarly articles are helpful in this process for somebody searching for words like these.

You can see down here that we have different sites paying for those words, which is fine, and it might be working great for them.

When you see the scholarly article, it’s another clue that helps marketers to better understand what Google learned about that searcher and what is Google using all that learning to think is the best answer for them.

Sample Google Search: “technology and consumer behavior”

Here’s a company going after that word that probably makes sense, but it is telling that there is some scholarly articles here showing as well. Don’t negate these words. It’s another clue for you to use to determine whether or not those words are working for you and to understand just what might be on the minds of your customers or the searcher so you can better target them.