Integrated search – a new buzz word

So you are looking for a new agency to help you with your digital strategy and all the people you have met are talking about delivering an “integrated search” strategy.

This is the new buzz word in search and it is here to stay. Affiliates, paid search, seo and social media working independently will not get you to the top of the search results. Paid search and seo go hand in hand. They are a match made in digital heaven and should not be treated as separately.

How do they compliment one another?
Studies have shown that if users see both a paid search ad and the natural search results, they will click on the natural search listings which is free. You are not paying for that click and if that therefore generates sales, you are lowering your cost per acquisition.

How can you integrate the two?
Communication is the key. Have regular meetings with the paid and natural search team. In this way both teams are aware of the campaigns and seo work on optimising the key landing pages the site wants to rank for making it appear higher in the search results.

Report back as one
When you are analysing the results, make sure you record how seo and ppc have complimented one another on a campaign by campaign level and then how this has led to a decrease in paid search costs overall. This way you can show to senior management and those in control of the purse strings the positive effect of integration while drilling down to the detail of the campaigns and can tweak these even further for next time.

Do you have any case studies where you have delivered an integrated search strategy that has worked well? Or perhaps you are still in the middle of working on it. Let me know, all comments welcome.

Photo is from Flickr

Include seo and social media as part of your search strategy

It is important to have an integrated search strategy to deliver to your clients. There is so much overlap between paid search, seo and social media, that implementing one without the other means that you are failing to capture all potential traffic to your website.

I work closely with social media who produce monitor the amount of online mentions or “buzz” for a particular brand. The seo guys use these buzz reports to see which bloggers and twitters are talking about the brands. The social media team contacts the bloggers but the seo team people give them the optimised content. This means that when the bloggers write about a particular product we have asked them to review they are linking back to our destinated web page on our key terms.

Facebook ties in with social media, but it also has an impact on seo. If your client wants to have a facebook page then they need to make sure it is optimised for seo. They must make sure that their key terms and links are on the facebook page and that they have an optimised URL.

Paid search and seo go hand in hand. By monitoring paid search adverts, we can see the number of impressions and click throughs for certain campaigns. If there is a high number of clicks on key terms and then we see through tracking that there is a high bounce rate, it may be that the landing page does not have enough content or that people cannot find what they are looking for. A new landing page will need to be created and the keywords that generated the highest CTR will be used in the page title, meta description and on page copy.

Another example of working together is when there is a brief for a new landing page to be built. Paid search will carry out keyword research to check the volumes around particular terms. This research can also feed into the seo recommendations.

The next time a client asks you just to do their paid search for them, look at their site and see if they have optimised it for seo. If they have not, show them the great opportunities there are with the integrated search strategy.

Integration is the key to unlocking traffic and high rankings.

PPC and SEO

SEM – otherwise called Search engine marketing, covers both SEO – search engine optimisation which is “organic” or “free” growth and paid search, also called ppc “pay per click”

It is important to understand the difference between the two which can be broken down into

Traffic

Display

Cost

Implementation

1. Traffic

With PPC you can increase the amount of traffic to your site much faster than with organic search.  You can set up campaigns easily through google analytics or msn or yahoo.

However, if you have built your site to be seo friendly, then you will see people click on your organic search listing in google.  Studies have shown people are more likely to click on the organic listings than the paid listings.

This brings us on the point 2.

2. Display

The paid ads are located in the top ad sections on a search result and in the right hand column where it says sponsored links.

The organic listings are below the sponsored link section. Most people only view the first page, so it is very important for your ad to appear on page 1.  Anything lower down may not be seen,

3.Cost

PPC stands for pay per click, everytime someone clicks on your ad, it costs you. The cost per click is dependent on the compeittion for the keywords you have bid for. The trick is to bid for the keywords that have the highest search volume but the lowest competition.  Easier said than done, I know.  With PPC you need to monitor your keywords closely, as competition for the words can change, one day it could be 25p a click and the next it could be 75p.

SEO costs in terms of time.  You need to build your site to be seo friendly from day one, which means including the meta data, increasing links to your site.  If you do not have this, then yes it may cost you a lot to implement it.  But if you start off from day one with SEO in mind then you will not have to encur expensive seo consultant fees.

This leads us on to the fourth and final difference.

4.Implementation

With PPC you can get to a high ranking quite quickly.  Simply open up an account with a search engine such as google adwords and bid for the keywords you want to use in your ad.  You may need to pay a lot for your ad especially if there is a lot of competition, but then you will get a lot more traffic to your site.

SEO on the other hand, takes a lot longer.  As I mentioned, you should build the site with SEO in mind from day one. Using all the meta data, submitting site map to google, updating the site with rich and dynamic content, maybe even having a blog. This way you will be able to create traffic to your site from day 1 and if you want to increase traffic for specific periods like Christmas or summer sales you could also use PPC.