If you’re running an SEO strategy with no clear distinction between paid and natural campaigns then it’s high time you make a change. Now, there’s even less regulation over how much a business can spend on paid campaigns, which gradually would lead to paid campaigns cannibalizing natural SEO. Thus, as a business owner, you must work towards developing a holistic search strategy to maintain a synergy between paid & natural SEO campaigns.
Here are 6 ways in which you can prioritize natural & paid searches-
Prioritizing Natural & Paid Campaigns: A Holistic Search Strategy
1. Reorganize your pay-per-click campaigns.
First and foremost, you need to make sure that the most recent keyword best practices have been incorporated into your paid search campaigns. Reorganize your attempts to use broad matches specifically, paying particular attention to negative keywords.
On the one hand, the quantity of groups and positive keywords in your campaign is probably going to decrease. At the same time, there should be more negatives. Negative keywords are more important than ever to protect your budget and guarantee that paid search advertising only appears when you want them to.
2. Set new performance benchmarks
Setting new performance benchmarks for sponsored and organic search is crucial before developing a synergy between natural and paid campaigns-
- Obtain Statistics-Related Data
After restructuring your sponsored search account, make sure to collect statistically meaningful data from all of your campaigns to comprehend the new performance dynamics. This will take longer the longer the conversion cycle is on your site.
But it’s well worthwhile. You will first acquire accurate and trustworthy data from paid searches. Second, throughout this calibration period, organic search will be reset and your organic presence will adjust.
- Maintaining Changes to Your Paid Search Negatives
Keep a tight eye on your sponsored search query reports during the aforementioned calibration time for more negative keywords to mine. It is strongly advised to use scripts to automate at least some of the tasks. Negative keyword lists in shared libraries will lessen the need for strenuous manual labor.
- Compare Monitor Change to Previous Baselines
Look at the change compared to the same period last year to account for any seasonality, in addition to the “before and after comparison” (i.e., comparison vs. the period preceding changes).
3. Utilize several success metrics
Think about the metrics that are crucial to track for comparison and will be most useful to your team.
A KPI loses priority if it is challenging for your team to affect it. Instead of basing the analysis on a single success criterion, use a weighted, multiple-metrics method.
- Conversion rate metric
The most obvious metrics to use are conversion rate and cost/conversion event, which take into account how profitable and expensive it is to use each site visit. Other metrics will describe why and how to improve a specific performance.
- Clicks or visits
This is a useful list of opportunities to rank in order of importance. Any opportunity or insight should be scalable enough to affect your business. Opportunities with a negligible influence on traffic are ultimately not worth investing resources in given the little impact on the bottom line.
- Bounce rate
Often used in SEO but neglected in paid search, bounce rate is an excellent indicator of how well the message of the search result and the content of the landing page match the user’s intent.
- Time on site, number of views, and pages per visit
The number of times users stay on the site and how much material they consume, along with the bounce rate, provide crucial context for conversion analytics. Do they convert poorly after seeing a lot of content? Maybe they aren’t bouncing but they’re still having trouble finding what they want, or maybe conversions are good but page views are high. This is a chance to examine the landing page content and streamline the user experience.
- CTR (click-through rate)
CTR is a fantastic metric for keeping those seemingly insignificant prospects on the radar if traffic opportunity is significantly bigger than your visits. Here, even a minor language SERP optimization would significantly increase site visitors.
- Rank/Position
Any comparison of organic and paid search would be lacking without taking SERP rank or position into account. Prioritizing a natural or a purchased outcome shouldn’t be centered just on rank, while it can explain a lot about performance. Even without ranking in the top organic or paid search rankings, site traffic and conversion optimization can be accomplished. The fact that you are close to a few postings is still cause for celebration.
4. Analyze the Effects of Paid and Organic Search on Website Engagement
Analyze how users interact with various parts of your site and to what extent natural vs. sponsored search drives these activities when natural and paid search trends level off. Using this data, you may decide whether sponsored search initiatives support organic search.
Based on how interaction from each channel supports business objectives, take into account how each channel influences engagement with each website area and the value of sponsored search traffic and organic search resources. Since indirect expenses associated with natural search are common, organic traffic is frequently thought of as “free.” However, it is not a coincidence; site SEO and deliberate content production are to blame.
By balancing expensive sponsored search activity, it can also successfully generate savings from paid searches. Therefore, it is only fair to take into account the price of natural search programs and resources as well. This will lay the groundwork for coordinating organic and paid search campaigns to fully meet business needs.
If paid search expenses are rising (to start saving), or if paid search activity is plateauing (for an extra boost), take into account increasing the natural search. Instead, if increasing natural search traffic has proven difficult, paid search should be given priority. It is important to avoid choosing one channel over the other even when sponsored or the organic search may end up taking the lead.
It is best to retain a basic presence when the search landscape changes and audience behavior changes for the channel being deprioritized. It can then be increased without starting from scratch if necessary.
5. Recognize The Complete SERP Landscape
Without taking the competitive environment into account, a search strategy would not be genuinely holistic. Comparing your own organic and sponsored search success is beneficial, but doing so without considering who else appears alongside you may obscure important insights into the reasons why results may be what they are.
For a full examination of organic versus natural search, it is crucial to incorporate competitive and universal search insights.
- When the first organic results display considerably lower in the SERP than their high rank should imply, ranking becomes complicated. The first organic result frequently doesn’t appear where a user may expect it to—below metasearch, shopping, and paid search listings.
- Understanding what happens onsite depends on the messaging in advertising and organic description. Instead of errors in one’s own organic or paid search strategies, poor performance may be caused by competitors having more attractive organic result descriptions or many assets showing up in the SERP.
- Another factor to watch out for is the misalignment of the landing page experience with what people perceive in the SERP, especially when considering the mobile device experience. A few rounds may be necessary to achieve the required visibility because the organic algorithm greatly influences natural search results.
6. Establish a Scalable Reporting Process and Joint Ownership with Regular Reviews
Create a scalable procedure that enables regular data collection, measurement, and insight sharing. To identify new patterns and make sure that any alterations are immediately addressed, close monitoring is essential. During this process, make sure that the results of both organic and paid searches are simultaneously reviewed under single ownership.
Without a straightforward means to align them for simultaneous analysis, paid and organic search success is much too frequently reported separately. In a perfect world, the same team and the same leaders would be in charge of both paid and organic search performance.
Having a single stakeholder for the natural and paid search strategies will ensure that neither channel is preferred over the other, with paid and organic techniques complimenting one another in addition to facilitating a shared search vision.
Conclusion:
You are prepared to utilize natural and paid search most synergistically when paid search execution has been enhanced to take into account the most recent broad match dynamics. Your business will have the right procedure, resources, and personnel to properly prioritize natural and sponsored search activities if you set up scalable joint reporting and sole ownership for success in both.
