SEM is a great tool for your brand! To speak of the least, it has some great benefits such as:
- Faster results
- Flexibility on SERP
- Ability to adjust budget between brand and non brand
- And a million more
However, over a period, brands reach at a stage when additional budgets are not necessarily driving additional coverage; as well as the RoAS is not as they’d expect due to issues with landing page performance, content quality and user experience.
While SEO is a great way to get that ‘additional and long term’ visibility, using SEO proactively ‘with’ SEM is far more strategically profitable than using it to fix something.
The good news is that it’s not that difficult either and using the below 5 tips, brands could get the best of both and achieve a much larger Share of Voice on SERP as early as possible.
Set-up Blended Reporting, instead of Isolated Performance Dashboards
As both SEM Ads and SEO results are visible on the same platform (Google Search), it makes sense to see how your domain is performing for a specific query, instead of how your channels are performing in silos. A great way is to introduce a metric called ‘Blended Click Through Rate i.e. bCTR’ that calculates the total Impression Share and CTR on Google as a platform, irrespective of the Channel.
Not sure how, reach out to our team.
Make sure your SEM and SEO team meet once a month
Oh no! One more meeting? But this one is going to be extremely valuable as you would have the following agenda to discuss:
- What categories are driving the most of the traffic on SEM
- Which Ad copies are performing really well on SEM
- Are there any themes that SEM is struggling on
- What categories are ranking in Top 3 using SEO
- What does the SERP look like on doing a few random keyword searches. What type of results do we see
By exploring these answers together, you will come up ideas to collaborate that you haven’t yet imagined.
SEM Data that SEO can use and benefit
There are a lot of insights that SEM team can provide SEO. Using these insights, SEO team can adjust their strategy to capture even much larger organic Share of Voice. These insights are as shown below.
SEO Data that SEM can use and benefit
Similarly, SEM can greatly benefit using tons of insights from SEO. After all, the objective is to optimally utilize spends and still capture as much market share as possible. These insights are as shown below.
Don’t Reduce Spends, rather outgrow the reach
One of a very common misconception is to use SEO strategy to reduce spends. While this sounds like we are saving the spends, however it does not solve the challenge to capture even larger market share by striking a fine balance between both challenges. The ideal reason of why we are using the best of both channel is explained by the process below.
- Start your SEM and SEO campaign together.
- While SEO take time, SEM is generating the qualified traffic.
- Overtime SEO performance improves, and we still have a great market share using SEM.
- SEO starts to replace SEM for outranking keywords, while SEM starts to expand the market share by capturing more keywords and markets
- The end result is a much larger Share of Voice due to a shared approach between channels.
