Paid Search Marketing: Are all your eggs in one basket?

by: Jim Grayson

Paid search marketing (PSM) isn't the only game in town. However effective your paid search marketing campaign might be, you should not ignore the benefits of optimised organic search marketing, and this means search engine optimisation, SEO. In fact a well planned online marketing campaign will make the best of both resources rather than relying on one. A balanced campaign is always better than having all your eggs in any single basket.

In some ways the approaches to SEO and PSM are opposites. SEO starts from the bottom up. When designing a website, SEO should be considered from the outset, rather than just be something that is bolted on the final result. The keywords, the quality of the copy, the functionality and the structure of the website should all be designed with SEO in mind, and there are numerous publications and guidelines regarding how this can be achieved, also when addressing your website competitor analysis take time to compare and contrast the relevant information. Of course link building and offsite publications are very important to SEO, but again the design of good landing pages is crucial. Link quality relates to the quality of the landing page and this is important to search engine robots as well as human beings.

On the other hand, PSM can be a top down activity. Naturally the quality of the landing pages are similarly important in order to encourage your visitors to stick, but the critical items are keyword selection and ad quality. An advantage of PSM is that it can produce very rapid results. The activities of SEO can take some months to put a site onto the first page of search engine results, but with PSM a well planned campaign can put your ad up there on the first page within days if not hours.

One thing that should be born in mind when developing your parallel campaign is the fact that links displayed in organic search are clicked on more frequently than PSM ads. In fact that ratio is something like ten to one. The ideal situation is when your PSM ad appears at the same time as an organic search result. It seems that there is a symbiotic effect, and the total click through rate is higher that the sum of click through when they appear individually. Developing a good balance between these two internet marketing tools is crucial to maximising your sales.


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