BrandStand » Synergize Your Search Marketing

May 1, 2009 | Steve Chitwood

Synergize Your Search Marketing

With limited budgets, high expectations, and short timelines, marketers are increasingly looking toward online channels to build their brands, acquire and retain customers, reduce costs, and capture any remaining trickle of available revenue the recession hasn’t evaporated. The quest for the best online investment of the precious marketing dollar often leads to search marketing and is met with confusion. What is more effective: optimization (SEO) or paid search (PPC)? The answer is simple: Yes.

There is no doubt that a well-optimized website and a dedicated effort to continually manage and expand the effort yields results. High natural or organic rankings can produce almost magical results; but a #1 organic ranking in Google, the holy grail of search marketing, is nearly as difficult to achieve as the one sought by Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, to say nothing of the effort to keep it.

There is also little doubt that paid search, primarily pay-per-click (PPC) – dominated by Google’s AdWords product – can yield terrific results while stoking the marketer’s desire for quantifiable results and near-instantly scalable engagement. Nothing says “return on investment” like real-time cost of conversion tracking, but the intricacies of sophisticated PPC advertising can be overwhelming.

So, back to the original question: What is more effective, SEO or PPC? The answer, yes, lies in employing both in simultaneous synergy. A combined effort, executed cooperatively, will yield better results than employing one strategy or the other.

For example, a paid effort typically starts with a sophisticated keyword research process that is usually more involved than a corresponding organic effort. Most importantly, the paid effort will reveal high-value keywords that the organic effort can leverage to focus its content generation and optimization efforts. Segmentation of users based on entry points could help hone an effort to focus paid traffic on revenue-producing activities and organic traffic toward more informational content.

Similarly, consistent messaging that spans key optimization points and directly relates to paid ad development can have a tremendous effect. In the case of ad group landing pages, a key element of the paid effort, organic optimization techniques can increase the quality rating of the campaign, which leads to better positioning and lower bids.

Combined analytics and reporting can also yield benefits and allow practitioners of both strategies to learn from each other. Performance of particular paid campaigns might reveal content holes that the organic effort should address. Popularity of organic content can make difficult bid determination decisions easier.

Often, multiple agencies or internal departments have divided responsibility for different search objectives. Sometimes, a predisposition toward one channel or the other segments the effort. There is a case to be made for a synergized search effort that leverages paid and organic techniques to produce better results. The prudent marketer who engages a search effort in his/her online plan will leverage the whole channel.