The synergy between paid search (SEM) and natural or organic search (SEO) remains a popular topic because of the many benefits a business can experience from their synergies.
From leaning on organic results to offset paid search costs to using paid search targeting settings to tailoring results to different audiences, opportunities for synergy abound organic and paid search.
Google’s move this year to prioritize broad match within paid search creates even more urgency for organic and paid search synergy.
With less control over paid search results, there’s a greater chance that paid search campaigns cannibalize natural search efforts.
Marketers who don’t regularly review organic and paid traffic share will be surprised to see that paid search has expanded to capture more traffic from new search results, which may not convert well and have to exclude
With this change in the paid search landscape, develop a comprehensive search strategy. Follow these six steps to ensure you address all the new implications of paid search for organic search.
Before developing strategies for prioritizing organic and paid search efforts, it will be important to take several basic steps and analyze trends in your site’s analytics.
1. Restructure your paid search campaigns
First, make sure your paid search campaigns have adopted the latest keyword best practices.
Specifically, restructure your efforts to take advantage of broad match by paying close attention to negative keywords.
On the one hand, your campaign is likely to be reduced in the number of groups and positive keywords.
At the same time, the number of negatives should grow. Negative keywords are more crucial than ever to avoid budget burnout and ensure that your paid search ads are shown only under the desired circumstances.
2. Establish new performance baselines
Before designing organic and paid synergy strategies, it is essential to establish new performance baselines across organic and paid search.
Get statistically significant data
With your restructured paid search account, make sure you’re acquiring statistically meaningful data in your campaigns to understand new performance dynamics. The longer your site’s conversion cycle, the longer it will take.
However, it is very worth it. First, you get clean and reliable paid search data.
Second, this calibration period will double as reset time for organic search and for your organic presence to adjust.
Continue to fine-tune your paid search negatives
During the calibration period above, take a close look at your paid search query reports for additional negative keywords.
It is recommended to take advantage of scripts to automate at least some of the steps. Using negative keyword lists in shared libraries will help reduce heavy manual loading.
Monitor change versus previous baselines
Apart from the ‘before and after’ comparison (i.e. comparison to the period before the changes), look at the change from the same period a year ago, so you take into account any seasonality.
3. Use multiple metrics of success
Think about which metrics are important to monitor to compare and will be most useful to your team.
If a KPI is difficult for your team to influence, it becomes of secondary importance.
Use a weighted, multi-metric approach instead of pinning your analysis on any single success criteria.
Conversion rate, cost/conversion event: The most intuitive metrics take into account the success and cost of leveraging each site visit. Other metrics will explain why a certain performance is observed and how to improve it.
Clicks or visits: This is a useful guide for prioritizing opportunities. Any opportunity or vision identified should pass the test of being scalable enough to impact your business. Ultimately, opportunities with limited traffic impact aren’t worth the investment of resources given the small effect on results.
Bounce Rate: Often used in SEO and overlooked for paid search, bounce rate is a good indicator of whether your user intent aligns with the message of the search result (more on that later) and the content of the landing page.
Time on Site, Page Views, Pages/Visit: Along with bounce rate, knowing how long users spend on your site and how much content they’ve consumed provides much-needed context for conversion metrics. Do people get sick after watching a lot of content? Maybe they’re not bouncing but still not finding what they need, or conversions are strong with high pageviews. This is an opportunity to look at the content of the landing page and shorten the site journey.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): If the traffic opportunity is much larger than your visits, CTR is a good metric to keep these seemingly small opportunities on the radar. Here, even a small SERP language optimization would significantly increase site traffic.
Ranking/Position: Any analysis of organic vs. paid search would be incomplete without considering SERP rank or position. It can tell a lot about performance, but prioritizing a paid or organic result shouldn’t just focus on rank. Maximizing conversions and site traffic can be achieved even without ranking in the top organic or paid search positions. Being within striking distance of a couple of listings is still worth getting excited about.
4. Analyze the contribution of organic and paid search to drive site engagement
As natural and paid search trends stabilize, analyze how users interact with various parts of your site and how much natural and paid search are driving these activities.
With this information, you can determine whether your paid search efforts are complementing natural search.
Consider how each channel drives engagement with each area of the website and how much the cost of paid search traffic and organic search resources is worth based on how each channel’s engagement supports business goals.
Because organic search costs are indirect, there is often a tendency to view organic traffic as “free.” However, it is not accidental, as a result of deliberate content creation and site optimization efforts.
It can also effectively generate paid search savings by offsetting expensive paid search activity. Therefore, it is fair to consider the cost of natural search resources and programs alongside.
This will set the stage for aligning organic and paid search strategies to support business needs comprehensively.
Consider increasing organic search if paid search costs are rising (to start saving) or if paid search activity is plateauing for an extra boost.
Alternatively, it’s worth prioritizing paid search when organic search traffic has been difficult to achieve or grow.
While paid or natural search may end up playing a leading role, it pays not to choose one channel over the other.
As the search space evolves and audience behavior changes for the channel being prioritized, it’s best to maintain a core presence. It can then be scaled up if needed without starting from scratch.
5. Understand the complete SERP landscape
A truly holistic search strategy would be incomplete without considering the competitive landscape.
Comparing your organic and paid search performance is useful, but doing so without the context of who’s appearing next to it misses out on valuable insights into why the results are the way they are.
Incorporating competitive and universal search information is essential to a thorough analysis of organic vs natural search.
Classification becomes complicated when the first organic results appear much lower in the SERP than their high rank might suggest. The first organic result often appears below the metasearch, shopping, and paid search listings, so it’s not in the first implicit position a user might see.
Your ad messages and organic description are key to understand what is happening on the site. Poor performance could be due to competitors having more compelling organic result descriptions or multiple assets appearing in the SERP, rather than a fallacy in the organic or paid search tactics themselves.
Landing page experience misalignment with what users see in the SERP is another dynamic to consider, especially considering the mobile experience. With natural search results heavily determined by the organic algorithm, achieving the desired visibility may take a few rounds.
6. Establish a periodic review cadence with a scalable reporting process and shared ownership
Finally, establish a scalable process that enables consistent data collection, measurement, and information sharing.
Careful monitoring is key to spot emerging trends and ensure any changes are addressed quickly.
In doing so, ensure organic and paid search results are reviewed together with the unique property.
Too often, organic and paid search performance are reported separately without an easy way to align them for joint analysis.
Ideally, ownership of organic and paid search performance success would reside within the same team and the same prospect.
In addition to facilitating a joint search vision, having a single player for both organic and paid search strategy will ensure that no one channel is favored over the other, with paid and organic tactics truly complementing each other.
Summary
With paid search execution updated to account for the latest broad match dynamics and a complementary approach between natural and paid search, you’re ready to leverage organic and paid search more synergistically.
Setting up scalable joint reporting and single ownership for natural and paid search success will ensure your organization has the right process, tools and people to prioritize organic and paid search efforts. more effective way.
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Featured image: Constantin Stanciu/Shutterstock
