We cannot stress enough the importance of both paid search and organic search in your digital marketing strategy. As we’ve mentioned previously, SEO is instrumental in generating revenue, as it is a low cost investment, with a high rate of return if tactics are chosen carefully and in accordance with your specific goals. Organic search can be boosted through keywords, link building, content, and social media once modified based on data extracted from Google Analytics. Paid search is a great tactic which allows advertisers to actually pay for the opportunity to be the selected winners of bids that are relevant to their ads if the combination of their ‘Quality Scores’ and bid amount are solid enough to win. Paid search also allows for the opportunity to be highly selective about the types of audiences who can view your ads. These tactics are useful and proven successful for millions of advertisers in a myriad of ways, but they are only as good as their relevance to your small business. So we have to consider how you can determine what combination of paid and/or organic search will work best for you so you can get the results you’ve been yearning for.
First here is the breakdown of the pro’s and con’s of each
ORGANIC SEARCH
Pros
- Google is an extremely powerful search engine, with 33% of clicks from organic search results going to the first listing in Google and 92% of all search results going to the first page of Google.
- Low Cost and high return with 57% of B2B marketers reporting SEO as having the greatest impact on lead generation
Cons
- Requires ample time to generate enough content to increase Google Search Rankings
PAID SEARCH
Pros
- Ability to curate ads with a myriad of features such as ECPC, keyword modifiers, Adwords IF Functionality, ad scheduling, target locations etc to appeal to those target audiences most likely to convert
- Ability to immediately promote your ads in one of Google’s pages with a combination of payment and a solid Quality Score
Cons
- Requires payment to adequately promote your ads in Google
- Need a solid Quality Score to adequately compete with those advertisers who have even more money and popularity to win bids in the industry which you reside
- Can be low-cost tactic overtime if ads accurately cater to target audiences and landing pages are optimized with a call-to-action which yields to greater conversions
Really, it’s easy to identify where paid search or organic search could be effective when businesses have a clear understanding of which tactics can meet their advertising needs. For this reason, it is extremely important for you to understand for yourself HOW to determine which combination of tactics can meet your business needs and yield to higher conversions overall. So HOW can you make this determination?
Through trial and error.
Say you are using Google Analytics and you’ve noticed that after implementing a group of keywords, your web traffic substantially increases in users and page-views, and your bounce rate significantly decreased as you started to curate content that very specifically appealed to brand name athletic shoes as an online retailer, but only interacted with keywords to generate eve higher user rates. You can then assume that using your current group of keywords along with this type of content signals a significant SEO combination and will continue to generate more revenue for you if implemented. You can also assume that page views will increase even more as you continue to use the current group of keywords (and perhaps modifying even more so based on the search queries most commonly attached to high CTR’s) and that your content type will continue to lower bounce rates. Any other correlations or interactions you notice can be incorporated into your ads with different features that will help you appeal to target audiences, further increasing your conversions and telling you where your SEO can be improved.
Or say you’ve started to use Google AdWords and noticed a dramatic increase in revenue or ROI by capturing those ‘micro moments’ when conversion rates were highest through ad scheduling and location targeting, you could assume that appealing your ads to target audiences in these ways are effective paid search moves which should be explored in the future.
So really it all boils down to identifying your business needs and exploring through trial and error what combination of paid search or organic search tactics will yield to the greatest increase in conversion rates. It may seem like a daunting process at first, but really understanding the patterns in your data by assessing, testing and applying can and will greatly tell you how paid search and organic search tactics can work together to meet your SEO needs. So don’t hesitate. Success is right around the corner!