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.