Search Engine Results
Gestalt theory within the school of psychology emphasizes that the whole of anything is more significant than its parts and that one cannot understand the details of something without understanding something as a whole.
Similarly, search engine results comprise two main components in organic and paid listings. By better understanding the whole picture of search and how the two listing types complement each other best to meet your unique needs, you can create a well-assembled search marketing effort that combines these elements strategically and aim for exponential returns.
Search engine results relevant to your products, business, services, and industry are critical real estate in the digital marketing world. To maximize your footprint within this vital area of the buyer’s journey, you need both paid search and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) running in parallel paths of complementary efforts.
As we’ve mentioned, SEO is a marathon that compliments the ongoing sprint of search advertising. Your business must have a strategy and a strong cadence of tactics to maximize your search engine marketing visibility. Even basic SEO, which includes developing quality content, blog posts, and link building, takes time to establish your website within search rankings. So, there’s no better time than now to get the ball rolling.
SEO101: How Does SEO Improve Paid Search?
Both SEO and paid search involve keyword research, albeit through different lenses. SEO typically adopts a wider view of terms, anything relevant to your web pages and audience from brand awareness to engagement, while paid search primarily focuses on keywords that drive action.
However, SEO improves paid search even when the two different keyword universes intersect. There’s a direct correlation between organic results accompanying paid ads and higher quality score, which decreases CPCs. Furthermore, SEO enhancements, such as page speed will also improve quality scores and CPCs.
Organic traffic comprises 64% of website traffic with upwards of 18% CTR in top positions, while paid search makes up just 6% of traffic with 2% AVG. CTR. So, it’s imperative that you balance your search marketing initiatives to focus on the entire spectrum of search engine listings. But, how do you do that?
SEO101: Getting Started with SEO Adjacent to Paid Search
First, beyond creating clusters of keyword-relevant topics that are well interlinked, Search Engine Optimization’s significant focus is ensuring that your site’s pages render quickly, accessibly, and in a user-friendly manner, as discussed in our post about addressing Core Web Vitals within Google’s algorithm to improve search results.
SEO updates such as these will certainly aid in your search advertising efforts, as your paid search landing pages will also perform better from a quality score and conversion rate perspective. Site speed is an excellent area to address without too much strategy before moving forward, supporting both paid search and SEO simultaneously.
Second, your buyer journey likely involves so many different queries around your product that you may not be the focus of your paid search efforts. Often, search advertising focuses on lower-funnel keywords, such as your brand or direct categories related to your product that pre-qualify the audience as interested. Paid search marketers concentrate on a narrower list of keywords isolated to converting keywords only; SEO provides an opportunity for greater visibility and awareness through upper-funnel, educational keyword focus.
With that in mind, it’s an excellent idea to go beyond the ready-to-purchase or sign-up keyword list and focus SEO efforts on the massive upper funnel, less-competitive list of keywords and topics. Leverage blog posts to write articles on various topics of interest to your target audience, build brand awareness and gain your target audience’s trust for consideration.
Search Engine Optimization can also complement what works best within paid search. Take your top-performing keyword insights from search advertising and fold them into the hierarchy and SEO framework of your website. It would be best to build out your website’s main sections with supporting content clusters and pages that dive deeper into related details.
With this approach, you can ultimately begin to list for both paid and organic results simultaneously – attaining more real estate for crucial searches from your customer base. Ranking well within search advertising and SEO is a proven way to improve click-through rate while decreasing CPCs.
Finally, something to keep in mind is balancing the quality and quantity of traffic. While paid media, including paid search and banner, are effectively proven channels for our clients, we often see total organic conversion rates double our clients paid conversion rates. It’s necessary to understand Bing and Google search algorithm updates and prioritize regular efforts around this high-quality source of traffic.
SEO101: How Does Paid Search Benefit SEO?
As stated in the last point above, SEO and paid search often work in tandem within search results. However, that is not where their synergies end. While Google’s John Mueller and many other experts have gone on record to dismiss that search advertising directly impacts organic search listings, experts like Mueller admit to the obvious: you need to promote your site to get the SEO ball rolling. There’s also evidence to show a direct correlation between running paid search and spikes in organic traffic.
Google Ads, which includes management for paid search, Google Display Network, YouTube, and Discovery campaigns, is undoubtedly a one-stop shop for promoting your site. Plus, many times, when searchers see your paid ad, they may be inclined to choose your organic listing instead. In this way – search advertising directly compliments your organic listings by reinforcing your brand’s relevance to a given query.
Google constantly updates its search algorithm, while businesses update, migrate websites, and witness organic traffic fluctuations. It, therefore, behooves digital marketing teams to have a mapped paid search contingency plan should any category of business begin to see declines within organic traffic until your SEO team or agency addresses the decrease in traffic.
Furthermore, if visitors from your paid ads share your content via social media, this too is likely factored in how your content ranks. People ultimately engage with valuable content, and if the content you’re promoting is not beneficial, it’s also evident to search engines based on the data they crawl.
In summary, ensuring that you deliver content in an SEO-friendly manner will help your paid search efforts, while search advertising also has a role to play within your organic search traffic results. Strategically aligning these acquisition channels will lead to exponential returns.
If your team is interested in getting assistance with your digital marketing initiatives, you can reach out to us at sales@leverinteractive.com; we’re more than happy to help you with your SEO and digital marketing needs.
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