Practices for Combining SEO and SEM

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Search engine marketing is a process aimed at bringing visitors to a website and occurs at the intersection of two common advertising techniques: SEO and contextual advertising. Whether your company is a small business or a large corporation, Some Advertising Tips apply to all. The aim of search engine marketing is to drive a commercial website higher in search engine results and thus boost revenue.

Nowadays, marketers in the company have understood that SEM and SEO are not different fields. Rather, these two are two sides of the same coin, complementary initiatives, proper work that can drive the target site. For instance, banner advertising (“pay-per-click” or PPC) greatly influences SEO metrics and targeted requests for natural search. “Heat maps” are able and ought to be applied in contextual advertisements, where the cost of mainstream phrases can soar to astronomical figures.

But how can these two fields be combined? For instance, how can SEO & SEM agencies collaborate to enhance promotion overall?

Here are three actionable tips from the SEO & SEM agency expert to assist marketers in making the first move in this partnership.

1. Find intersection points

The initial approach to merging SEO and SEM plans is to ascertain where these programs overlap and in which areas there should never be repetition. Success in working with paid search engine advertising services cannot be claimed without attaining good performance in natural search. Employ your working web analytics tools to identify which keywords are effective for each direction at the same time and which are only effective for paid clicks or natural links.

When SEO and SEM agency teams operate separately, high-frequency keywords attract traffic through just two mediums: contextual advertising or natural links. But when they operate together, an SEM agency along with SEO can streamline the promotion process. For instance, if you employed only contextual advertising and paid for each click – now you can experiment with SEO promotion for these keywords (for instance, using them as natural links). On the contrary, if low-frequency words are chosen for website promotion, which has a low cost in contextual advertisement services, why not attempt to bring even more visitors by directing some of the advertising budget in this direction?

Of course, with lots of data – say, searching for paid search query intersection points and natural search keywords – an automated-only solution must be employed. “Manual” analysis is only possible with small stand-alone sites; it is best to deal with only a leading SEM agency that has the required software capability for a large-scale ad campaign.

Start by identifying the top search queries in each of the two directions. Then, from the resulting array of requests, you need to leave only the most suitable ones.

2. Determine Percentage of “Paid Clicks.”

Measuring the proportion of “paid clicks” in each direction is the most effective means of locating the above-mentioned “intersection points” (rather than attempting to compare the number of impressions, clicks, and click-throughs). There are numerous means of making these measurements. The most straightforward one would be like this:

  • Take a keyword.
  • Sum up all clicks on contextual ads, banners, and natural links.
  • Determine the number of paid clicks.

Apply the proportion to determine the required percentage.

This figure, referred to as “Paid to Click Percentage”, will enable advertisers to immediately and easily determine the “hole” in the sea of natural and paid links.

A keyword that doesn’t generate any or just a few clicks isn’t worth promotion further. Filtering by such conditions will make it possible for you to assemble a list of requests (even full pages), and you will be able to sort them immediately in terms of the level of “promotion”. On this principle, it will be more productive to schedule SEO tasks.

3. Clarify, Recheck, Repeat

With SEO and SEM agency technologies utilized in conjunction, marketers will get the most revenue from both avenues. Moreover, looking for “holes” in natural queries and content advertising will enhance work productivity. But this is not a project of one-time occurrence.

Web and advertisement strategies keep changing. Do this analysis frequently. If your business is too small to build SEM and SEO divisions, you can simply take advantage of a virtual SEM agency’s assistance – or go for an SEM expert who knows what he is doing.