Organic search and paid search strategies typically aim to achieve the same thing: visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) for the people most likely to engage with your business. But all too often, these strategies are formed and optimised in silos.
Here are three ways you can build a cohesive search strategy to super-charge your performance.
Paid search can uncover the performance of your business/website on different search queries at speed and at scale. You can then use insights from paid search (for example, the search terms more likely to drive a sale or enquiry) to inform which keywords to optimise your website for organically.
You can also explore Search Query Reports in your paid search platform to find additional terms people are searching. If any of those terms perform well or produce ample search volume, you may use these in your organic strategy.
The more visibility, the better! If you’re concerned your paid search ads are cannibalising your organic search traffic on the same queries, find out if you’re getting the most out of your search budget here.
Before you go to the effort of updating headlines and meta descriptions across your website, learn which text drives the best engagement rates. This can be done by split-testing multiple ad copy variations in your paid search campaigns. For the most insightful results, focus your split-testing efforts on keywords you want to appear for organically.
Once you’ve got the insights you need, it’s time to apply the top-performing ad copy variations driving the highest click-through rate (CTR) to your website. You can even go one step further and apply the messaging that generated the highest return on ad spend (ROAS).
Landing page development can take a hefty investment of time and cash. Be sure your landing page templates are optimised to drive action by split-testing their performance using paid search experiments.
Learnings taken from SEM ad copy aren’t only useful in SEO – they can also support the messaging decisions you make across other marketing collateral (such as EDMs, physical mail, website banners, catalogues, brand messaging for different target audiences, and more).
To take the best learnings from your ad copy, it’s worth testing elements such as:
You can then expand split-testing efforts to more visual paid mediums – like Google Display or Facebook Ads – to test the performance of:
Let’s say you want to reduce paid media costs where ads aren’t effective.
Give these tips a go and super-charge your search strategy. For some help implementing any of these ideas, reach out and speak to an expert.