At a time when the online publishing sector is almost as squeezed by the economy as its offline brethren, boosting visitors and engagement are key to maintaining and raising the ad revenue that can mean the survival of a publishing site. Typically this is best done through properly optimizing site content but it takes time to analyze the current site, make SEO recommendations, deploy those recommendations, and then for those changes to begin to bear fruit.
Many publishers assume that the cost of using paid search to support onsite advertising is unsustainable. In many cases this is in fact true, but there are instances where paid search can be arbitraged properly to build profitable ad revenue. For instance, we were able to achieve a cost per page view of under $0.01 for a women’s interest publisher while driving over a million pageviews a month. In part this was due to their narrow focus – we were able to cherrypick less expensive keywords that still drove traffic – something considerably more difficult with a larger general interest site.
Over time however this works best as a bridge to SEO’s effects kicking in. SEO and paid search can be compared to the difference between buying and renting a home. Sure, renting is great for the short term. Renting can allow you to experiment with all sorts of living arrangements (Brooklyn chic but cramped, suburban swank) to find out what best suits your lifestyle. Similarly, you can use your short term PPC campaign to help plan your long term SEO effort and find out what works best for your goals.
A paid search campaign allows you to look at which keywords performed the best and structure their SEO efforts around it. The same can be said for the ad copy. If the paid search copy that referenced free shipping worked great for conversions, use it in your Meta description so that success will be carried over to your organic listing.
Paid search can still be used moving forward to fill in the gaps of your SEO efforts. This is especially useful for misspellings and misunderstandings.
Unifying paid search and SEO is not a new concept. After all, they can both map to common goals using keywords, both rely on SERP visibility and relevance, and can in fact increase clickthough rates when used in tandem.
Although one can see the importance of running either one alone, it’s clear that SEO and paid search can feed off of each other to create the most efficient and effective campaign to achieve your goals. Whether it’s using one to make up where the other lacks or using one to help with strategy on the other, the benefits of running them together and sharing data can’t be ignored and in a sector as pressured as online publishing could make the difference between publishing and perishing.
Tags: Advertising, Electronic publishing, Pay per click, Promotion, Publishing, Search engine optimization, Search engine results page, Web Design and Development
