As advertisers increasingly seek to synchronize their pay-per-click and organic search engine marketing campaigns, a new strategic discipline is emerging-integrated search engine marketing. The goal of an integrated SEM campaign is to deliver better overall ROI than search engine optimization and pay-per-click campaigns would have yielded independently. This article outlines the opportunities that are unique to integrated SEM and the best practices that can exploit them to maximize ROI.
Treating the Search Results Page as a Distinct Medium
We generally refer to pay-per-click advertisements as “media”, but is organic search engine optimization (SEO) a “medium”? Not really, most would call it a “process”. Still, SEO is an effective marketing tool because it helps to deliver a message to an audience. And a message must be delivered via a medium. So, what is the medium through which SEO functions? The search engine results page is a medium of its own.
This is, of course, also the medium through with pay-per-click works. When web users submit a query, search engines return to them a single HTML document that they view all at once, which contains a mix of natural and paid listings. The users then consume this document by reading various portions of it and eventually clicking on a link. Users interact with search engine results pages holistically, so integrated SEM campaigns should plan and strategize holistically for this medium.
How to get the most users from the search results page to the advertiser’s site at the least cost is a complex problem, involving many variables, but it is nonetheless a single problem with a single optimal solution. Maximizing ROI across the campaign as a whole involves co-optimizing the pay-per-click and SEO campaigns on a variety of factors.
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