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.
How Integrated SEM Can Deliver a Coherent Message on the Search Results Page
Many high-profile advertisers go after the top spots in both paid and organic in order to maximize traffic to their site. Nielsen recently found that appearing in both natural and organic results increased traffic by anywhere between 32% and 300%. Why is there so much variation rather than a consistent increase of around 100% when implementing an additional format, People often balk at the higher figure, 300%, because they wonder how combining two formats could yield such a large super-additive effect. But this kind of effect can indeed be achieved by employing best practices for branding in the search engine results medium.
Health information seekers use search engines because they want only the most relevant, reliable, authoritative sites. According to a study by Dick Morris Associates, 66% of consumers say they expect leading brands to hold the top listings in search engines. When health information seekers see natural and paid search results with a similar style and appearance, this increases their confidence in the reliability of the results and improves their perception of the brand.
Conversely, badly incongruous listings in natural and paid results may have a negative impact on one another. Many users are wary of potentially unreliable information on the internet, and inconsistent branding may be a red flag for some potential visitors. When the two campaigns are out of sync, the whole can end up being less than the sum of its parts. This results in a sub-additive interaction between the campaigns, as reflected in the low 32% increase figure in the Nielsen study above.
With best practices, integrated SEM makes it possible to dramatically increase mindshare on the search results medium overall. Several factors influence how prevalent, consistent, coherent and authoritative the brand appears on the results page:
“Do the paid ad text and the organic listing “snippet” have a similar language, style and tone?
“Are they both highly ranked?
” Do the paid ad’s display URL and the organic listing’s URL match up?
While paid listings give the advertiser complete control over the content and format of the listing, this is more challenging on the organic side. However, top-end SEO vendors can control these properties of the organic listing. With best practices for integrated SEM, one should not manage these listings independently, but instead work on both sides simultaneously to present a polished and potent brand image that dominates the search results page.
How Paid Search and Organic SEO Can Help Each Other
1) Dynamic Single Keyphrase List
Some keyphrases are better suited for paid than organic or vice-versa. For example, a maker of an allergy drug would not want the misnomer hay fever to be prominent on their site, and would thus be unable to optimize for it organically. However, this keyphrase incurs over 12,000 searches monthly, many by potential customers who want information on allergy treatments. Hay fever would therefore fit nicely into a pay-per-click campaign, because the advertiser would not need to actually publish this particular keyphrase in the ad or on the site in order to serve ads for it.
Furthermore, best practices integrated SEM involves continually and dynamically optimizing across the organic and paid formats. Very often the regulatory, competitive or media landscape changes during the course of a campaign. For example, have new competitors entered the pay-per-click ad space and dramatically increased costs? Has the physical layout of the search results page changed and made pay-per-click listings more prominent than organic ones for a particular keyphrase? Are new regulatory restrictions making it too difficult to include the appropriate text on the advertiser’s site to optimize for a particular keyphrase? Is one format simply performing better or more poorly than expected? Integrated SEM providers should monitor factors like these and many others in order to dynamically optimize their clients’ campaigns.
2) Optimization Based on the Physical Layout of the Search Results Page
Search engines rank results in descending order of relevance. Search engine users know that whatever is in the top spot will be the most relevant to their query, and, accordingly whatever is in the top spot tends to get the most clicks. However, the “top spot” is not the same place on every search results page. For high-volume keyphrases with many expensive pay-per-click ads, search engines optimize their ad revenue by displaying the top paid listings at the very top of the page, above the organic results.� For lower volume keyphrases with less lucrative ads, the only pay-per-click ads appear on the side bar.
For example, the keyphrase hair removal on Google currently returns three paid ads at the top of the page. The site www.hairfacts.com, which appears “first” on this page organically, is actually the fourth from the top in the physical layout. In contrast, the lower-tier keyphrase depilatory treatment has no paid ads at the top of the page. If an advertiser for a hair removal treatment wanted to be in the true top position for all relevant keyphrases, this would mean buying the top paid spot for hair removal and optimizing for the top organic spot on depilatory treatment.
3) Pay-Per-Click as Research for SEO
Keyphrases can be added to the paid side of a campaign with little effort or expense. Paid can therefore serve as a testing ground for potential organic keyphrases. Traffic estimations, which are a staple of pre-SEO research and planning, can tell us how many searches to expect for “blood pressure”, but data from paid search can tell us how often people who queried “blood pressure” were actually interested in high blood pressure medication. Paid search marketing data are an under-utilized resource for easily and inexpensively determining the ROI potential for keyphrases prior to implementing them in the more costly and labor-intensive organic search format. By sharing research and conducting integrated strategy and planning sessions, the integrated SEM team leverages all available data in order to produce the best possible campaigns.
Convenience for the Client
Despite the potential strategic and creative advantages of integrated SEM, many advertisers end up doing integrated SEM as a matter of convenience, rather than strategy. Busy brand managers enjoy the streamlined management, oversight, and accountability of working with one vendor rather than two, and they are never forced to serve as an intermediary between two vendors undertaking related projects. But well-executed integrated SEM should go beyond simply relieving these burdens. Potential unique client deliverables of integrated SEM include:
- Enabling clients to set comprehensive SEM goals.
- Co-optimizing natural and paid budgets in whatever way best achieves the campaign goals.
- Conducting integrated strategy meetings.
- Delivering integrated reports that demonstrate the overall effectiveness of the SEM campaign.
Implementing Integrated SEM
Despite the advantages of this general approach, many advertisers question its feasibility for their brands. Most often, they have established successful relationships with separate vendors for paid and organic SEM. It is important to remember that integrated SEM is a strategic perspective-not a media buying model-and it may just as well be implemented by two or more providers. There are many successful examples of integrated SEM campaigns resulting from cooperation between vendors. With multiple vendors, the overarching principle is still the same: To maximize ROI in search, advertisers must adopt a user-centered perspective on search engine marketing, and tailor their overall search strategy to reflect the holistic user experience of the search engine results page.
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