3 Ways to Integrate Your SEO and SEM Strategies

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.

1) Find strong performing paid keywords and optimise for organic search

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.

2) Use paid search as a testing ground and apply learnings to your website

Ad Copy

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 Pages

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.

EDMs, Website Banners & More

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:

• Calls to action
• Unique selling points
• Headlines
• Description lines / meta descriptions
• Seller rating extensions / review snippet structured data.

You can then expand split-testing efforts to more visual paid mediums – like Google Display or Facebook Ads – to test the performance of:

• Brand and button colours
• Speed of image rotation
• Lifestyle vs. product-focused imagery
• Image layout.

3) Reduce paid search keyword bids where organic search ranks well

Let’s say you want to reduce paid media costs where ads aren’t effective.

Paid search could share findings like:

• Keywords with a high cost per click
• Keywords with a high conversion rate
• Keywords with a high transaction value
• Keywords with a low ROAS.

Organic search could generate insights like:

• Keywords the site ranks well for organically.

By sharing these two channels’ insights, SEM and SEO strategies can create learnings to:

• Pull back on spend in areas where paid search drives a low ROAS, but the websites ranks well for organically
• Increase focus on organic search optimisation for high-value keywords that are too expensive to compete for in paid search.

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.