Two Methods to Help Decide Between Organic SEO and Paid Search

November 11, 2009 by jford
Filed under: Uncategorized

As we have covered in the past, there are many differences between organic search engine optimization and paid search marketing. Many small and medium sized businesses that are new to the platform of search marketing have the dilemma of using both mediums, or choosing between. The question came up during my most recent speaking engagement. I am going to offer two quick criteria points based on my experiences that you may be able to use in your decisions.

1. What is your target audience? If you are serving a local market, you may want to target your keywords and then leverage the geo-targeting advantages that pay per click marketing offers. You can use this to serve ads on search engine result pages defined across very specific geographic areas. For organic SEO, this can be tricky, especially in the area of on page optimization. If you have to focus on queries like “book store in Lansing”, it takes some very good attention to detail in your meta titling, and body content. By contrast, in paid search we can focus on broader keyword variations but define what geographic locations you want your ads to be served in, and not be concerned with being burdened by geographic keyword orientation in the content and code on your site.

2. Conduct a quick benchmarking study using the free Rank Checker from SEO Book, and you can see what keywords your site is ranking out for. If you have some that are ranking out within the top two pages, perhaps this is a good window of opportunity to focus on SEO and gain first page, and consequent top three rankings. If keywords that are important to you are ranked out very low, like 86th, or not ranked at all, it may be time for paid search. The reason being is that even if you aggressively focus on SEO, you are probably 3-6 months away from seeing rankings, and an even greater amount of time away from seeing quality traffic from those rankings. To get quality traffic - may be time to deploy a paid search campaign.

And finally, it is can be a good idea to test both mediums. If you are committing resources to both tactics, often times there can be intelligence gathered from each to help the other. (Note: sometimes this is not the case as paid traffic can behave much more differently than organic traffic depending on your sector) For example, you may deploy a paid search test over a month’s period, and from this use Google Analytics to evaluate which keywords deliver higher performing traffic.

Remember, aside from your overall conversion goals, pay attention to metrics per keyword such as bounce rate, average time on site, and pages per visit. (To view this, go to Traffic Sources>Keywords) If you are using Google AdWords, you can link up your campaign directly to Google Analytics by going to the Reporting tab>Google Analytics drop down option to initiate the link. Using this data in a short term test, you can evaluate what keywords tend to deliver higher levels of quality traffic. Developing those clusters of keywords, you are now armed with keyword research in which to embark on your longer term SEO strategy of optimizing on site for those keywords. Again, I will caution that in some sectors, paid traffic will behave much more differently than organic search traffic, but it is worth the test.

Hope this helps as you try to decide where to commit your search marketing time, resources, and budgets.

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