As most companies have figured out that a well thought out paid search strategy and operational approach is essential to drive demand, few have understood the importance of driving natural search effectively in a combined approach to search marketing.
Many marketeers seem to think that being present in paid search is enough to drive ROI accretive leads. This is false for two important reasons.
Firstly, paid search effectiveness/ ROI is highly dependent upon market prices. These are in turn set based on auctioning. As competition increases for similar search words or terms, it is reasonable to assume that the available marginal ROI will approach zero. Factors such as quality score in Google’s adwords will continue to be a differentiating factor for price. Nevertheless, paid search alone can hardly generate long term abnormal ROIs everything equal.
Secondly, natural search is emerging as a key area for differentiation in terms of ROI effectiveness. This is due to three key drivers:
- Natural search offers a true marcom cost scaling opportunity. It is “free” by nature and is increasingly (as Google et al are setting up anti SEO cheat units e.g. compliance services) entirely a performance/ quality/ relevance exercise.
- Natural search has a much higher share of clicks on a search result page than paid search. Hence, natural search will scale your clicks given same spend much faster than any top placement of paid search ads. Top natural search page will capture up to 40% of clicks on a page where as top paid will capture one forth of that.
- Finally, successful natural search has a multiplier effect on number of clicks from a search result page to your page. In typical cases clicks will increase from say 1-2% of total search result page visits when in top ten paid results to >6% if you hit top presence in both paid search and natural search.
This suggests that any ROI optimized paid search campaign or strategy in the future must have a natural search effort linked closely to it. Otherwise you will be throwing away precious marketing dollars.
