Integrating Paid and Organic Search Marketing

  Paid search and SEO principles seem to remain largely separate entities when it comes to online marketing according to Expedia’s Director of Inbound Marketing, Martin MacDonald.

Speaking recently at the Performance Marketing Insights Conference, he stressed the importance of combining the two search marketing disciplines.  Driving qualified leads to your site requires a focus on both paid and organic search. You could be wasting money on paid search advertising if you are not capturing the right people at the right time and sending them to the right product. Martin argues that SEO and PPC must be combined in order to target customers earlier in the sales stream.

For example, it is harder to compete in the organic listings once your customers already know what product they are after. Because 80% of search clicks are still organic but 48% of conversions happen against paid traffic, businesses need to make their paid and organic search strategies work in tandem.

How consumers interact with your search strategies should determine your keyword and optimisation selections.

Consequently, it is important to understand the path your customers took to get to you in order to set the strategy for paid and organic listings.

You may wish to tailor content for your organic listings towards people at the decision making stage. This may mean offering rich informative content about a variety of products.

Similarly, you may wish to tailor your paid search to attract visitors who are ready to buy with reviews, ratings and offers. The two search techniques speak to different consumer segments that may be at different stages of purchase. PPC can then be used to track the effectiveness of balancing your search strategies to help you continually tweak and adjust them.

As a result, it could be beneficial to integrate PPC with SEO content in order to maximise your return on investment when it comes to your overall search marketing strategy.