The benefits of balancing your natural and paid search activity

Paul Doleman, Chief Technical Officer at Spannerworks, offers invaluable advice on how to balance your natural and paid search for a more effective and profitable campaign.

With this summer’s introduction of Google’s Quality Score, natural search engine optimisation and pay per click (PPC) search have become more closely linked than ever. Today, if your landing pages aren’t optimised Google will hit you with a higher pay-per-click cost because it favours and rewards the most relevant search results. What’s more, in January, Yahoo! will follow Google’s lead.

Unfortunately there remains an illusion that you can simply go ahead and achieve front page natural search visibility using generic search terms. This just isn’t the case. It takes months, if not years, to develop a strong, consistent natural search ranking, which means that competitors already achieving this have got quite a head start.

The introduction of Google and Yahoo!’s quality scores should encourage more businesses to embark on a natural search campaign. Otherwise, PPC will end up costing them an awful lot more than it needs to. Yet until natural search is up and running you’re still going to need paid search to establish a search presence and build brand awareness in the short-term. The synergy between the two forms exists from the very start.

Once a campaign is bedded down and natural search is delivering results, a search consultancy needs to work with its clients on a cost/benefit analysis process to successfully balance natural search and PPC activity so that they work to each other’s mutual benefit. Effective natural search means that paid spend can be lowered which improves a client’s return on investment. Also, terms used on each campaign can be benchmarked against each other - added and removed to evaluate the effect on bid prices, click-throughs and fall-offs. In this way, successfully combining natural search and PPC can vastly improve click-through rates for both channels whilst reducing bid costs.

By way of illustration, as part of its campaign for Family Investments, Spannerworks used a deep-linking strategy – bidding on paid search terms that took users directly to highly relevant landing pages optimised for natural search. Due to Google’s Quality Score - which rewards page relevancy - this approach doubled Family Investment’s traffic whilst at the same time halving its cost per click.

A successful campaign will also use the experience and intelligence of one search channel to benefit the other. A good example is the expansion of natural search terms, which helps identify profitable terms from the tail (i.e. the most detailed search terms). These can then be integrated into the PPC campaign. In the other direction, PPC can be used as a testing ground for thousands of keywords, the best of which can then be applied to natural search optimisation.

Paid search can also complement natural search by acting as a channel through which to react to real world events. For example, should the cricket team manage to turn things round in Australia, a drinks retailer might bid on the term ‘England ashes win’ to take advantage of the country’s celebratory mood. An airline could use paid search alongside its natural search campaign to push last minute availability in an effort to get as many bums on seats as possible. Dell could have done with a bit of proactive PPC activity to assist customers and help counter the negative publicity around its battery recall embarrassment. Finally, paid search can also be an effective way to support a product launch - either through search engines or content networks - especially when there isn’t the time or opportunity to integrate it into the natural search campaign.

The synergies between natural search and PPC are clear. They work together to improve quality score, enable consistent brand presence from the start of a campaign and flexibility during it, and they also facilitate mutual keyword discovery. The relationship helps to ensure that each campaign is functioning as effectively as it possibly can, which leads to efficiency, cost-effectiveness and, ultimately, a stronger brand.

Article by Paul Doleman, Chief Technology Officer, Spannerworks