Meryl Heidenreich
By: Meryl Heidenreich – Bayshore Solutions Senior Digital Marketer
At Bayshore Solutions, many of our clients choose to allocate their budgets towards paid search, in addition to organic search (among other digital marketing strategies), because the ability to market to your target audience, at the moment they are actively looking for what you to have offer, is incomparable to other marketing mediums. Our clients engage with us to enter in search engine marketing strategies, because compared to their experience in traditional marketing, it offers better targeting, cost efficiencies and clearer ROI.
We examine the search market each one of our clients is competing in and understand there are a number of searches occurring within search engines for terms relating to our clients’ business every day. Each search is going to conclude with a visit to a website – either yours or a competitor’s – to research or make a purchase. We set out to achieve the maximum amount of qualified website traffic out of that search market. Often, we achieve the greatest results through a combined organic and paid search strategy.
Better Optimization
Combining paid and organic search data provides us with the best information from which to drive strategy and optimize campaigns. Paid search rankings and results are virtually instant, while a good SEO strategy will help a site rank higher over a longer period of time. With a paid search budget generating clicks to a large array of keywords, we can quickly get the ROI of bidding on each keyword to adjust our paid search strategy and budget. By using paid search, we’re able to explore new keywords and vet them for inclusion in our organic strategy by seeing how they interacted with a client’s website, and the results of that interaction. This allows us to concentrate our extensive organic efforts in the most effective places. Conversely, organic keywords that generate good user interactions or conversion rates, but not enough traffic may warrant additions to paid search campaigns, with calls to action and custom landing pages.
Business Intelligence
Paid search data provides us and our clients with great business intelligence. While their website will likely only rank for the terms we actually use within its pages to describe their products and services, a broad-match bidding keyword strategy in a paid search campaign can allow us to get traffic from the variety of ways people actually search for their products and services. The way people search is an indicator of how they think and describe an offering and what they want out of it. By evaluating the search terms that actually convert into sales, we can work with our clients to adjust not only digital campaigns, but their branding and marketing language.
Better Results Together
Statistically, greater overall results are achieved when running a paid and organic campaign together. Perhaps owning more of the real estate in a search results page lends your brand some amount of credibility, and makes it stand out among other unfamiliar brands in that list of providers of what the searcher is looking for. Regardless, the following data provided by Google is undeniable:
- 89% of search ad clicks are incremental – meaning that 89% of the traffic generated by the ads would not be achieved organically if the ads are paused.
- 88% of mobile search ad clicks are incremental
Despite the notion that people will just gravitate to organic listings if you aren’t running paid advertisements, this data shows that you will miss out on traffic without the paid ads. Even a great SEO strategy will not result in your site ranking for every keyword search you’d like to:
- 81% of search ads don’t have a corresponding organic result at all– If your strategy is only organic, you are likely missing out on qualified traffic
Even in the scenario where one does have an organic result in a high ranking position, there is likely additional search market that can be acquired. This Google chart shows how having both paid and organic listings present increases awareness, even with an organic rank of number one:
Image Source: Google
If you intend to use search marketing to reach customers looking for what you offer, reap the benefits of the better optimization potential, business intelligence, and complimentary results that a combined paid and organic search strategy provides. The digital marketing team at Bayshore Solutions has the expertise and experience to maximize the results of an ROI driven search marketing campaign. Contact us today, and we’ll show you how a custom combined organic and paid search strategy can work together for your business.
Meryl Heidenreich is on the Digital Marketing Team at Bayshore Solutions—a Web Design, Web Development, and Digital Marketing Company.