By Derek Louden
It’s Getting Crowded
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a discipline that, like most things digital, has become more sophisticated (and complicated) over the past decade. As online content continues to explode and everyone is using a smartphone, marketers now more than ever need to ensure that potential customers can find them by staying up to date on search engine marketing. According to a study by McKinsey & Company, the amount of digital content is expected to grow by a factor of 44 annually between 2009 and 2020, and with an estimated global value creation of over $780 billion, the importance of SEM cannot be overstated.
Equally important to the issue of search engine visibility is the issue of managing SEM efforts to ensure they are providing positive, measurable results and thus are driving the client’s business forward. With no shortage of places for marketers to spend their finite resources on improving their SEM game, it is recommended that attention be given to how they can spend smarter to ultimately advance their digital business. By managing and evaluating search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) efforts with common metrics and fostering communication between these (usually) separate teams, marketers stand to substantially improve the efficiency of their programs.
The Old Model
SEM is most commonly divided into two distinct parts. In one corner, you have SEO, which deals primarily with technical factors of website construction that affect how a site ranks on major search engines like Google and Bing for desired keyword searches. On the other side, you have PPC search, where marketers have more direct control over user experience through bidding on desired keywords. It’s this control that drives a more direct comparison between dollars invested and results generated. While the paths of these two disciplines occasionally cross, for the most part they’ve remained separately managed and evaluated.
It’s recommended that these different methods for increasing search engine visibility are best managed together when marketers consider both the business goals they are trying to achieve and how both SEO and PPC can help to achieve those goals together. The emergence and maturation of social platforms like Facebook and Google+ have changed the SEM game, and continuous developments in the PPC search space, notably mobile, should give marketers sufficient incentives to encourage collaboration between their SEM and SEO teams where they can more effectively achieve common goals.
Let’s Work Together
The most important efficiency gained from ensuring a company’s SEM goals are consistent is that they can make sure to communicate the same message in both organic and PPC search. This way, when users are searching on high-value terms, the paid and natural results complement each other to provide a consistent experience for the user.
Another, perhaps more important, benefit to managing PPC and SEO together is an assurance that information is flowing freely between teams as they move toward achieving marketing goals. When managed separately, or by separate firms, there tends to be a competitiveness that can stifle information flow as each firm tries to achieve the goals that will help them to keep their jobs. This can work against the client and can even produce inferior overall results. When the climate between these teams is a more open one, the client ends up reaping the benefits. An example of this type of cross-discipline sharing could be the examination of keywords from a PPC campaign that were particularly successful or profitable and then incorporating these keywords into future SEO efforts. Another could be the analysis of natural keywords driving particularly high levels of customer engagement that could uncover broader customer characteristics. By using existing performance data on these keywords, the risk of underperformance is lowered since something about the keywords’ performance was known prior to their utilization.
One of the areas seeing explosive growth is mobile SEO, where companies are discovering that users coming from mobile devices have different needs than those coming from desktop search. One useful exercise for the SEO team to perform is to examine inbound search traffic from the mobile site to get a pulse on what users are searching for while using their mobile device. For example, users looking for an insurance brand from their mobile device are most likely searching for “towing” or “roadside assistance” rather than trying to get a quick quote. Google has also started providing mobile-specific keyword search traffic so that marketers can begin to understand temperamental differences between mobile and desktop searchers. This information could be used to inform the PPC campaign to target these terms through mobile and perhaps promote a mobile app that is in development. This is just one example to show how this type of information sharing can lead to smarter, more successful campaigns.
Campaign Goals
When boiled down to its simplest form, dollars invested in a marketer’s digital presence are intended to affect the bottom line. This is achieved through attracting an increasing number of qualified visitors and potential customers, or purchasing ad space that effectively gets in front of these potential customers. The degree to which the investment is successful is what ultimately determines the direction of future marketing efforts. The question then becomes, how is this success measured? It is at this point where the marketing team or agency partner will step in and define those activities that qualified users are most likely taking. For e-commerce sites, the metric could be sales, and for sites where transactions aren’t possible, valuable activities might be store locators, product descriptions or signing up for email updates.
For a company’s SEM efforts, this becomes an important discussion because many times the SEO and website teams will have different goals than the PPC team, which is typically more connected with the specific marketing efforts. With each of these practices aiming for common goals, the end result can be a practice where both SEO and PPC drive more results together than either practice could achieve on their own.
Finally, the definition of goals is only as good as the methods used to quantify those goals. This is where both teams should coordinate closely to understand the fundamental differences in how they work together. While a company’s SEO efforts should be concerned with user experience on the site, it’s the quality of that user experience that ultimately influences whether a user converts. This is where communication with the marketing team and those managing PPC strategy should be very close. If the ultimate goal is to increase sales, then intelligence gained from either practice can make the other smarter, whether that’s discovering keywords that appear to drive particularly efficient conversions or which text ads are generating the best clickthrough rates (CTR).
Bringing It All Together
The value that search can unlock for companies is immense, but is only fully realizable when all the parts are working together efficiently. For this to happen, companies have to realize that SEO and PPC are really working toward very compatible and similar goals. It is through this type of coordination and information sharing that marketers can unlock the full potential of search engine marketing for their brands.