While everyone understands the benefits of leveraging both Organic and Paid Search strategies, more often teams, both in house and agency side, only talk about collaborating and sharing insights. Understanding the importance of an omnichannel strategy and the customer journey is only one piece, execution is another story.
Collaboration across channels within the agency or with a client’s other agency partners or internal teams is critical. Although there’s always room to improve whether learning more from the data or testing theories sooner, the key to efficient and successful cross channel campaigns is sharing and analyzing the data and insights. Sounds simple enough… well, you would think. Unfortunately, we all often run into channels or teams that operate as silos, forgetting that the customer, their customer has multiple touch points. And today, the customer’s journey is more complex and often no longer a simple linear journey. Not only do brands now need to attract customers at the top of the funnel, but throughout all stages of the customer journey. Reaching the customer with the right message at the right time is key, but how can you do so if you’re digital channels aren’t collaborating?
The answer isn’t groundbreaking, nor does the solution require insane amounts of time, but it’s surprising, if not mind-blowing when you ask how many teams are sharing data and collaborating. After all, everyone is working towards the same end goals
PPC + SEO: Let’s All Be Friends
Sharing insights across channels is not a new idea. For example, many of the insights in this PPC vs SEO article for 2016 still hold true and can be used to get more successful results. In fact, we set out to test and refine the process to create actionable steps all teams can follow and easily implement.
Before we dive into the process let’s do a quick review of the benefits of each channel to better show how they can and should be integrated for the best results. The complementary nature of the two channels – Organic Search can help build brand awareness and credibility long term despite changing ad spend. Paid Search has the speed, agility, and targeting to test and iterate quickly, not to mention the prime position in the search results.
SEO Benefits:
• Brand awareness
• Credibility
• (Free) CPCs
• Not Dependent on Ad Spend
o However, subject to algorithm updates
PPC Benefits:
• Speed & Agility
• Prime position (top of the page)
• Focused Targeting
• A/B testing
• Independent of algorithm updates
Non-Brand Campaigns
Non-brand search campaigns are key as the most valuable SEO campaigns are focused on bringing in new traffic to the website through non-brand keywords. In almost all cases, a brand is going to already rank for their own brand, naturally. If you’re going to gain market share, you need to bring in customers who don’t have the brand recognition for your service or product. From a Paid Search perspective, leverage your non-brand keywords to work harder versus only relying on brand keywords to drive conversions.
