Why Paid Search and Organic Search Optimizations Should Work Together

No man is an island. Two heads are better than one. We hear these sayings everywhere and practice collaboration constantly throughout our daily lives. The same principals are true when it comes to building towards higher search rankings. If you are running a search engine marketing campaign, such as Google AdWords, your paid search and organic search optimizations should work together to provide the best results.

Some businesses – or the agencies they work with – have separate teams responsible for making organic search and paid search optimizations. When you have two groups working separately towards a similar goal, your outcome might be less than stellar. But why does performance go up when these efforts are combined?

Consistent Goals Across Your Business

All marketing initiatives should have a goal, regardless of what medium is being used. Ultimately, in digital media, the main goal is the conversion. When your paid search and organic search optimizations work together toward the same goal, your performance increases and you will likely see more conversions. In fact, one case study found that combining paid search and organic search efforts resulted in a 30% increase in organic traffic and a 25% increase in traffic from search engine marketing.

When they collaborate, both teams have the same understanding of the larger goal. They will be able to analyze the results from paid search and organic search to understand where the weak points are and which effort is really performing best.

A Holistic View of Your Site and Marketing Efforts

When making optimizations – whether for paid or organic search – your keyword list will make or break your results. When two teams work separately, it’s hard to be sure that the same list is being used, and if so, what strategies are in play. It’s unclear what is really moving the needle.

By making sure that your paid search and organic search optimizations work together, you can feel confident that you have a strategy that accounts for each of your marketing efforts. The alternative is two disparate strategies, which could be acting against each other.

More Impactful Decisions

By creating shared goals and a holistic view of the strategies among teams, your paid search and organic search optimizations will both become stronger. You will find that your teams will be able to make decisions that have more impact on results of both efforts at once. By providing a bird’s eye view of both paid and organic search performance, your teams will begin making optimizations that work for both initiatives.

For example, your paid search team may notice that a keyword is performing fairly well on your AdWords campaign, but it is not appropriately represented in your organic search listings. The two teams can then work together to update your site’s content and metadata, optimizing towards that keyword, and increasing your organic search visibility. This will, in turn, improve your Quality Score for the keyword, increasing the performance of your paid search campaign as well.

Numbers Speak Louder Than Words

There have been numerous studies showing that running a paid search campaign can increase your organic search results, even doubling brand recall in some instances. However, the most important element is to make sure that your optimizations for both are in sync. Having a holistic view of all marketing efforts and the business goals will allow paid and organic search to work hand in hand.

Still lost? We can help! At Paradigm New Media Group, we focus on solving clients’ business problems as a group – using insights from each area of expertise across all of our teams. If you’re in need of an SEO lifesaver or looking to start a search engine marketing campaign, drop us a line!