Organic and paid search synergies

What is organic and paid search synergy and how can it benefit your digital marketing strategy? Strengthening your position in Google Search requires a sustainable strategy for both paid and organic. Learn more in this blog post written by Senior Digital Specialist, Mihalis Tsiropoulos.

Why should you care about paid and organic search synergy?

Long-term wins (particularly pertaining to SEO) do not happen overnight, require greater organisational commitments and success can be difficult to predict – particularly when you add search engine marketing (SEM) to the mix.

However, by gathering and leveraging insights across both organic and paid traffic from the search engine result page, you can start creating collaboration between the two channels as well as increased performance.

Below is an overview of just some of the benefits that our clients have gained from organic and paid synergies:

1. Greater understanding of user behaviour across channels
2. Greater understanding of user intent in search
3. Higher conversion rate due to more relevant landing pages
4. More relevance increases Quality Score and a lower CPC
5. With more real estate in the SERP we see an increase in organic conversions
6. A clearer outline of content’s potential with high impact
7. Higher rankings and visibility for existing keywords
8. Visibility and rankings for new keywords
9. Better prediction of performance in both channels
10. Reduced risk of Google penalties

So in summary, it’s a pretty great way of increasing performance, reducing costs and learning more about user intent.

Now that you’re convinced, how does organic and paid synergy work?

Strengthening your position in Google Search will require a sustainable strategy for both paid and organic. However, working in silos only reduces the efficiency of your two strategies – not your overall performance.

As a first step, master your strategy in paid and organic search separately. Once you have an optimal set-up for each, that’s when the work can begin…

For several years, Precis was primarily a paid search agency. Excelling this at a level that has granted us acknowledgement and awards (Find out more here), but also expanded our understanding of search as a whole.

By applying our data-driven approach to search and leveraging a meticulous approach to attribution we have been able to orchestrate harmony between both search channels by looking at similarities and differences in user behaviour.

Search synergies

You can think of search dominance as a space rocket with two engines that must run smoothly – both individually – and in conjunction:

• Engine 1, SEO: Organic search results can be controlled by having web page listings that match the user’s search query (SEO).
• Engine 2, SEM: Paid search ads can be controlled by optimising and bidding on keywords that match the user’s search query (SEM).

In both cases, we optimise for relevance, and as each rocket engine is maintained and monitored continuously, new opportunities to optimise the overall output occur.

In order to explore the opportunities of bridging the two channels together, the optimal approach is to apply the user journey funnel to map out correlations between user intent with the organic and paid setup.

By letting the user intent dictate the potential synergies, you can own more real estate in both paid and organic results. When search queries are higher up the user journey funnel, the proper presence and preferred type of results tend to be organic only.

This can be illustrated in a table, where we divide between the different intent behind a given search query. The division can simply be developed by underlying words or topics that clearly show the intent:

User intent

The user intent can vary depending on how the query is structured, and this is particularly important when you want to utilise this data for building synergies between organic and paid since this is where you are able to detect if the search query indicates the potential of a commercial or transactional search.

Differentiating your communication across organic and paid depending on the user intent then places you in a much better position to ensure domination of search results pages.

Utilising learnings from both paid and organic search

By implementing Google Search Console in Google Ads, you can have access to the paid & organic report, where you can see how often your brand gains traffic on the same search queries from both channels – thereby better understanding how paid text ads and organic search results complement each other.

This report works well for obtaining insights, and the next step is to take action on these learnings.

Ads and organic text snippets

By extracting the keyword report, we can first look into optimising our Title Tags and Meta Descriptions from those pages, where paid traffic performs well, but organic is struggling.

Simply extract all your ads and implement headings and descriptions as title tags and meta descriptions. We can expect that this will be common for transactional searches.

At the same time, if we experience that organic is outperforming paid traffic, and the user intent is still low funnel, we can extract our title tag and meta description and implement them as headings and description lines in our Google ads.

Optimising organic rankings

Looking at paid performance on a landing page level, you can also extract information about how to optimise HTML tags in general. Looking at anything from heading tags and structured data to traffic from devices and search term reports enables you to quickly understand if there is potential to either implement more relevant HTML tags or optimise the ones you already have.

As an example, we could see that specific ads with more actionable headings were performing better in our shopping ads. Therefore, we added this actionable term into our heading tag on all product pages and saw an increase in organic rankings due to the fact that they were now correlating more with user intent.

Optimising relevance – Quality Score

The absolute best learning to act on is the overlap between search queries that shows when relevance is high and when it is not.

Identifying what search queries both have the potential of performing cross-channel – and at the same time using them as topics for creating more relevant landing pages that match the user intent – will automatically increase the overall relevance not only for the page, but for the whole website.

Quality Score is a system for Google to decide the CPC and Ad Rank for an ad. Quality Score is a combination of Expected CTR, Ad Relevance and Landing Page Experience.

By making sure that Google has indexed and understood a website’s content according to search queries, you have a higher potential of improving Quality Score, since ads would then become more relevant both according to search queries, but also according to the actual site.

Final thoughts

In this post we have only included a simple approach to building synergies between paid and organic search. In the rapid development of both channels, the opportunities to bridge learnings from SEO and SEM is never ending.

Make sure to follow us on LinkedIn for more updates on this topic as they develop.