Combining paid search and search engine optimisation

by bigmouthmedia

Brands should coordinate SEO and PPC campaigns to avoid cannibalisation of results, phantom sales and strategies at cross purposes. Coordinating PPC and SEO allows brands to maximise ROI, messaging and enjoy even more transparent results.

Getting started

There are two important points which relate to almost every integrated search campaign:

• Get your analytics and tagging right from the beginning
• Each and every brand behaves differently; extensive test and learn strategies are required

The tagging is important as it is a considerable help if you can de-duplicate or attribute sales across SEO and PPC correctly.

For example, if someone searches on a generic term on Monday while researching the item they would like to buy and then returns to the site via a PPC brand click then neither PPC nor SEO should be credited with %100 of that sale. Doing so will result in recording two sales. One sale is real and the other would be a phantom created by tracking duplication.

A TagMan, Floodlight, universal tag or equivalent solution is ideal here as these provide the greatest transparency and flexibility. Alternatively, it is often possible to ensure that the web analytic solution used for SEO can identify PPC traffic and separate out reports.

Should you bid on your brand when you already rank in organic search?

This needs to be tested. Some brands are simply spending on a cost-per-click basis when there’s no need to do so. However, other brands make more money and improve their overall ROI by brand bidding.

Reasons for this include competitors or affiliates brand bidding, the increased brand awareness, the content network and the messaging in the PPC creative.

A tactic to test: When you’re ranking well in SEO try using your PPC creative to give the searcher a reason to click on your organic result.

Organising your keywords

Not all keywords behave in the same way. Some keywords perform better while consumers are in the earliest stages of research, some keywords perform once the consumer has a clear idea of what they want and other keywords are at the best when the consumer is ready to make a purchase. Lastly, some keywords come into play in re-targeting current or previous customers and for customer retention.

Equally, some keywords are highly profitable and important to the brand whereas other keywords are more expensive, less important or less profitable.

An integrated search campaign should be aware of the characteristics of each keyword so that the right channels in the right combination can be used to promote it.

For example, a ‘top tier’ keyword might be one which will always receive full PPC support whereas a ‘low tier’ keyword may have its PPC spend brought to zero once it performs well enough on SEO.

Growing your traffic and sales

SEO is often a long process. To achieve top rankings a website must convince the search engines that it is a trusted authority on the subject it wishes to rank for.

A valid SEO strategy is to start with a niche or micro-niche and become the authority there. Once that status is achieved and the SEO positions are strong then that niche can be expanded slightly. The battle for authority begins again.

While the site is gaining its authority status via SEO the PPC campaign can be used to buy the most appropriate traffic necessary to produce sales, bookings and revenue. Once the SEO traffic is strong enough the PPC campaign changes role from being the primary revenue driver to the tactical response. This strategy works well for some sites but not for others.

Landing page optimisation

It is far easier to engage in multi-variant landing page testing through PPC than SEO. Why? The JavaScript and other technologies used in the multi-variant test can sometimes blind search engine spiders and therefore harm SEO listings.

A preferred tactic is often to engage in multi-variant testing on landing pages blocked from organic search. This alone requires a degree of coordination between SEO and PPC.

Avoiding duplicate content and analytic errors

PPC and Display tracking often appends a query string to the end of a page URL.

For example, a PPC campaign to www.example.com might be tracked through URLs like www.example.com?cmp=ppc-google-1. The analytic system is told that any traffic which contains the URL element ?cmp=ppc-google-1 should be removed from organic search traffic and credited to the PPC campaign.

However, in this example, a user may click through on this URL and then copy and paste the address into a popular blog. The results could be traffic coming to the site, landing at www.example.com?cmp-google-1 and the analytics system crediting that traffic as PPC clicks.

This effect may be further compounded if a search engine like Google sees the link from the trusted blog to www.example.com?cmp-google-1 and ads it to the organic index. As a result www.example.com?cmp-google-1 might start to rank organically.

In the worse case a bid management system may be using the traffic and sales the blog and organic search are generating in its algorithm and may continue to spend money on that keyword set even though the keywords are performing badly.

By coordinating PPC and SEO efforts this sort of analytical overlap can be avoided. SEO efforts seek to remove duplicate content, showing the search engines that the preferred URL for a single page and therefore reducing the risk of these analytics errors.

Conclusion

Integrated search requires testing and the resources to support that. The rewards, however, are significant and ROI decisions made with far more intelligence if phantom sales can be identified and removed.