Despite the fears currently surrounding the economy investment in search engine marketing is continuing to grow as marketeers come under increasing pressure to show a return on investment for marketing spend. Search isn’t recession proof, but it is more recession resistant than other medias and this is reflected in eMarketers recent forecast, which has UK search spend growing 4.9% in 2009 compared to 2008 and double digit growth returning by 2012. eMarketer also forecasts that search spend will account for 62% of all online advertising spend in the UK in 2009, up from 59% in 2008.
Search, on the whole, is split into two distinct camps – Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which aims to get a website listed higher in the ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ listings, and Pay Per Click (PPC), where advertisers compete in a quality biased auction every time a search is made to appear as a ‘sponsored link’. However, SEO and PPC should not be viewed as two seperate channels but should be viewed as two strategies to take advantage of one channel – search.
True, the techniques employed to successfully negotiate your way up a search engine’s natural results may differ from those needed to most efficiently take advantage of the complex PPC auction model, but PPC can be used as a powerful tool to develop a successful SEO strategy. Businesses that haven’t integrated their SEO and PPC efforts have an unrealised opportunity to make their search investments go a lot further. And that’s good news – especially in this climate.
Paid and natural coverage against any given keyword needs to be dictated by performance – specifically by volume and profitability. Keywords with high volumes but which are unprofitable for PPC (due to high costs per click or poor conversion rates) should be prioritised for SEO, providing opportunity for PPC budgets to be re-allocated from these keywords and invested elsewhere. Conversely, low volume but profitable keywords for PPC (due to low costs per click or good conversion rates) will not be the first priority keywords for SEO as PPC can efficiently cover poor natural visibility here in the short term.
One of the key aspects of any integrated search strategy is using PPC as a testing ground for SEO keyword selection. PPC can tell you in days whether or not a keyword is worthy of being optimised for SEO, while the same learnings in SEO could potentially take 3-6 months to gather. This is due to the different natures of PPC and SEO – with PPC an advertiser can decide that they want to appear against a certain search term and within minutes can be on the first page of Google, where as with SEO it can take months of work to appear on the first page, work that will be wasted should it be that the keyword is not appropriate for the advertiser.
It’s also important to optimise not just towards ‘converting’ keywords, but to look beyond the last click wins attribution model and identify core ‘assisting’ keywords and ensure that you are optimising against these terms for SEO as well.
Once a keyword is ranking high in the natural listings there is often an argument that the advertiser can stop their PPC activity on this keyword. However this isn’t always necessarily the best approach. Numerous studies have found that there is incremental value in having good visibility across both paid and SEO for your best performing keywords. This is something that needs to be tested at a keyword level – if you are to leave PPC ads showing when natural rank is strong you need to know that you are not just cannibalising natural traffic and that you actually are delivering incremental conversions.
This test should include positional testing for PPC – testing the optimum position for your paid search ad in relation to your natural listing. Is it best to appear first in both paid and SEO or is it more effective to have one showing above and one showing below the fold? Should you attempt to ‘align’ your natural and paid position so that they appear next to each other?
For keywords where PPC and SEO are both needed advertisers need to think carefully about their ad copy – Search is one channel with two opportunities for messaging. There are two approaches than an advertiser can take, deliberately integrated or deliberately segregated.
An integrated approach to messaging would involve taking the learnings from PPC ad copy tests and mirroring the best features (for both ‘click through rates’ and ROI) in the SEO messaging. As an example, in PPC ‘Book Now’ may prove to be a more efficient call to action than ‘Book Online’ and as such could be used in the messaging for natural search as well.
A segregated approach to messaging can also work well, whereby you can use PPC to support tactical or promotional messaging while your natural listing relays your core brand messaging.
The good news is that integrated search strategies are actually nowhere near as complicated as they initially sound – you simply need to take a step back and view search as search, and PPC and SEO as complimentary rather than competitive. All advertisers want the same thing – the greatest return possible from their investment and as such search should, at a top line, be reported on as total search investment against total search returns. Search strategy shouldn’t be viewed in isolation either; it needs to tie in with business goals, with investment driven by value, volume, expansion or (more likely) a mixture of the three.
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Nice post Dan
Despite the ever growing importance of integrating PPC and SEO, it is still remarkable how many advertisers still can not / do not.
It is much easier said than done however and even if the intent is there, does the technology being used facilitate the true integration?
We have a useful article on this here:
http://www.mecmanchester.co.uk/blog/why-cant-you-integrate-ppc-and-seo.html
Nice article there Silv, nice to see that we agree on viewing search as search, rather than continually segregating PPC & SEO. Also agree that intent without the proper technology (and proper technology without genuine intent!) is as good as useless.
Dan.