SEO
6 Steps To Prioritize Natural & Paid Search In A Holistic Search Strategy
The synergy between paid search (SEM) and natural or organic search (SEO) remains a popular topic due to the many benefits a business can experience from their synergies.
From leaning on organic results to offset paid search costs to using paid search targeting settings to tailoring results to distinct audiences, opportunities abound for organic and paid search synergy.
Google’s move this year to prioritize broad matches within paid search creates even more urgency for natural and paid search synergy.
With less control over paid search results, there is a greater chance of paid search campaigns cannibalizing natural search efforts.
Marketers who do not regularly review organic and paid traffic share side-by-side will be surprised to find that paid search has expanded to capture more traffic from new query results, which may not convert well and need to be exluded.
With this shift in the paid search landscape, develop a holistic search strategy. Follow these six steps to ensure you address all new paid search implications for organic search.
Before developing strategies for prioritizing natural and paid search efforts, it will be important to take several foundational steps and analyze how your site analytics trends.
1. Restructure Your Paid Search Campaigns
First, ensure that your paid search campaigns have adopted the latest keyword best practices.
Specifically, restructure your efforts to leverage broad match paying close attention to negative keywords.
On the one hand, your campaign will likely shrink in the number of groups and positive keywords.
At the same time, the number of negatives should grow. Negative keywords are more crucial than ever to prevent budget drain and ensure paid search ads show only in the desired circumstances.
2. Establish New Performance Baselines
Before designing strategies for natural and paid synergy, it is essential to establish new performance baselines across paid and organic search.
Gain Statistically Significant Data
With your paid search account restructured, ensure that you acquire statistically significant data across your campaigns to understand new performance dynamics. The longer your site’s conversion cycle is, the longer this will take.
However, it is well worth it. First, you will gain clean and reliable paid search data.
Secondly, this calibration period will double as a reset time for organic search and for your organic presence to adjust.
Keep Adjusting Your Paid Search Negatives
During the above calibration period, closely watch your paid search query reports for additional negative keywords to mine.
Leveraging scripts is highly recommended to automate at least some of the steps. Using negative keyword lists in shared libraries will help reduce heavy manual lifting.
Monitor Change vs. Prior Baselines
Aside from the “before and after comparison” (i.e., comparison vs. the period preceding changes), look at the change vs. the same period a year ago, so you account for any seasonality.
3. Use Multiple Success Metrics
Consider what metrics are important to monitor for comparison and will be most actionable for your team.
If a KPI is hard for your team to influence, it becomes secondary importance.
Use a weighted, multiple metrics approach rather than pinning the analysis on any single success criteria.
- Conversion rate, cost/conversion event: The most intuitive metrics consider how successful and costly it is to leverage each site visit. Other metrics will explain why a given performance is observed and how to improve it.
- Clicks or visits: This is a helpful guide for prioritizing opportunities. Any identified opportunity or insight should pass the test of being scalable enough to impact your business. Opportunities with limited traffic impact are ultimately not worth a resource investment given the small effect on the bottom line.
- Bounce rate: Frequently used in SEO and overlooked for paid search, bounce rate is a good indicator if your user’s intent is aligned with the search result’s message (more on that later) and the landing page content.
- Time on site, page views, pages/visit: Together with bounce rate, knowing how long users spend on the site and how much content they have consumed provides much-needed context for conversion metrics. Are people converting poorly after seeing much content? Maybe they are not bouncing but still not finding what they need, or conversions are strong with high page views. This is an opportunity to look into the landing page content and shorten the site journey.
- Click-through rate (CTR): If traffic opportunity is much greater than your visits, CTR is a good metric for keeping those seemingly little opportunities on the radar. Here, even a small SERP language optimization would notably boost site traffic.
- Rank/position: Any organic versus paid search analysis would be incomplete without considering SERP rank or position. It can explain a lot about performance, but prioritizing a natural or a paid result, shouldn’t be focused solely on rank. Maximizing conversions and site traffic can be achieved even without ranking in top organic or paid search positions. Being in the striking distance of a couple of listings is still worth getting excited about.
4. Analyze Organic And Paid Search Contribution To Driving Site Engagement
As natural and paid search trends stabilize, analyze how users interact with various portions of your site and to what extent natural vs. paid search drives these activities.
With this information, you can then determine if paid search efforts complement natural search.
Consider how each channel drives engagement with each website area and to what extent the cost of paid search traffic and organic search resources are worthwhile based on how engagement from each channel supports business objectives.
With natural search costs being indirect, there is often a tendency to view organic traffic as “free.” However, it is not accidental, resulting from deliberate content creation and site optimization efforts.
It can also effectively create paid search savings by offsetting costly paid search activity. Thus, it is only fair to factor in the cost of natural search resources and programs alongside.
This will set the stage for how to align organic and paid search strategies to support business needs holistically.
Consider ramping up the natural search if paid search costs are escalating (to start saving) or if paid search activity is plateauing for an extra boost.
Alternatively, paid search is worth prioritizing when natural search traffic has been challenging to garner or grow.
While either paid or the natural search may end up in a leading role, it is worthwhile not to choose one channel at the expense of the other.
As the search space evolves and audience behavior shifts for the channel being deprioritized, it is best to maintain a base presence. It can then be ramped up if needed without doing so from scratch.
5. Understand The Full SERP Landscape
A truly holistic search strategy would be incomplete without considering the competitive landscape.
Comparing your own natural and paid search performance is helpful, but doing it without the context of who appears alongside misses valuable perspectives on why results are what they may be.
Incorporating competitive and universal search insights is essential for a thorough organic versus natural search analysis.
- Ranking gets tricky when the first organic results appear much lower in the SERP than their high rank may suggest. The first organic result often appears below metasearch, shopping, and paid search listings, thereby not being in the implied first position a user may see.
- Messaging in ads and organic description is key for understanding what happens onsite. Poor performance could be due to competitors having more compelling organic result descriptions or multiple assets appearing in the SERP, not missteps in one’s own organic or paid search tactics.
- Misalignment of landing page experience with what users see in the SERP is another dynamic to look out for, particularly with the mobile device experience in mind. With natural search results heavily determined by the organic algorithm, achieving the desired visibility may take a few rounds.
6. Establish A Regular Review Cadence With A Scalable Reporting Process And Joint Ownership
Finally, establish a scalable process that allows consistent data gathering, measurement, and insight sharing.
Close monitoring is key to spotting emerging trends and ensuring that any shifts are quickly addressed.
In doing so, ensure that natural and paid search findings are jointly reviewed with single ownership.
Too often, paid and organic search performance is reported separately without an easy way to align them for joint analysis.
Ideally, ownership of success across organic and paid search performance would reside within the same team and the same lead.
Aside from facilitating a joint search vision, having a singular stakeholder for natural and paid search strategy will ensure that neither channel is favored over the other, with paid and organic tactics truly complementing one another.
Summary
With paid search execution updated to account for the latest broad match dynamics and a complementary approach between natural and paid search, you are ready to harness natural and paid search most synergistically.
Setting up scalable joint reporting and singular ownership for natural and paid search success will ensure that your organization has the proper process, tools, and people to prioritize natural and paid search efforts most effectively.
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Featured Image: Constantin Stanciu/Shutterstock
SEO
Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey
Understanding the impact of your content at every touchpoint of the customer journey is essential – but that’s easier said than done. From attracting potential leads to nurturing them into loyal customers, there are many touchpoints to look into.
So how do you identify and take advantage of these opportunities for growth?
Watch this on-demand webinar and learn a comprehensive approach for measuring the value of your content initiatives, so you can optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.
You’ll learn:
- Fresh methods for measuring your content’s impact.
- Fascinating insights using first-touch attribution, and how it differs from the usual last-touch perspective.
- Ways to persuade decision-makers to invest in more content by showcasing its value convincingly.
With Bill Franklin and Oliver Tani of DAC Group, we unravel the nuances of attribution modeling, emphasizing the significance of layering first-touch and last-touch attribution within your measurement strategy.
Check out these insights to help you craft compelling content tailored to each stage, using an approach rooted in first-hand experience to ensure your content resonates.
Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or new to content measurement, this webinar promises valuable insights and actionable tactics to elevate your SEO game and optimize your content initiatives for success.
View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.
SEO
How to Find and Use Competitor Keywords
Competitor keywords are the keywords your rivals rank for in Google’s search results. They may rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in the paid results.
Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the easiest form of keyword research. If your competitors rank for or target particular keywords, it might be worth it for you to target them, too.
There is no way to see your competitors’ keywords without a tool like Ahrefs, which has a database of keywords and the sites that rank for them. As far as we know, Ahrefs has the biggest database of these keywords.
How to find all the keywords your competitor ranks for
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Organic keywords report
The report is sorted by traffic to show you the keywords sending your competitor the most visits. For example, Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword “mailchimp.”
Since you’re unlikely to rank for your competitor’s brand, you might want to exclude branded keywords from the report. You can do this by adding a Keyword > Doesn’t contain filter. In this example, we’ll filter out keywords containing “mailchimp” or any potential misspellings:
If you’re a new brand competing with one that’s established, you might also want to look for popular low-difficulty keywords. You can do this by setting the Volume filter to a minimum of 500 and the KD filter to a maximum of 10.
How to find keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter your competitor’s domain in the But these competitors do section
Hit “Show keyword opportunities,” and you’ll see all the keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also add a Volume and KD filter to find popular, low-difficulty keywords in this report.
How to find keywords multiple competitors rank for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter the domains of multiple competitors in the But these competitors do section
You’ll see all the keywords that at least one of these competitors ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also narrow the list down to keywords that all competitors rank for. Click on the Competitors’ positions filter and choose All 3 competitors:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Paid keywords report
This report shows you the keywords your competitors are targeting via Google Ads.
Since your competitor is paying for traffic from these keywords, it may indicate that they’re profitable for them—and could be for you, too.
You know what keywords your competitors are ranking for or bidding on. But what do you do with them? There are basically three options.
1. Create pages to target these keywords
You can only rank for keywords if you have content about them. So, the most straightforward thing you can do for competitors’ keywords you want to rank for is to create pages to target them.
However, before you do this, it’s worth clustering your competitor’s keywords by Parent Topic. This will group keywords that mean the same or similar things so you can target them all with one page.
Here’s how to do that:
- Export your competitor’s keywords, either from the Organic Keywords or Content Gap report
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
For example, MailChimp ranks for keywords like “what is digital marketing” and “digital marketing definition.” These and many others get clustered under the Parent Topic of “digital marketing” because people searching for them are all looking for the same thing: a definition of digital marketing. You only need to create one page to potentially rank for all these keywords.
2. Optimize existing content by filling subtopics
You don’t always need to create new content to rank for competitors’ keywords. Sometimes, you can optimize the content you already have to rank for them.
How do you know which keywords you can do this for? Try this:
- Export your competitor’s keywords
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
- Look for Parent Topics you already have content about
For example, if we analyze our competitor, we can see that seven keywords they rank for fall under the Parent Topic of “press release template.”
If we search our site, we see that we already have a page about this topic.
If we click the caret and check the keywords in the cluster, we see keywords like “press release example” and “press release format.”
To rank for the keywords in the cluster, we can probably optimize the page we already have by adding sections about the subtopics of “press release examples” and “press release format.”
3. Target these keywords with Google Ads
Paid keywords are the simplest—look through the report and see if there are any relevant keywords you might want to target, too.
For example, Mailchimp is bidding for the keyword “how to create a newsletter.”
If you’re ConvertKit, you may also want to target this keyword since it’s relevant.
If you decide to target the same keyword via Google Ads, you can hover over the magnifying glass to see the ads your competitor is using.
You can also see the landing page your competitor directs ad traffic to under the URL column.
Learn more
Check out more tutorials on how to do competitor keyword analysis:
SEO
Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important
Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at a recent search marketing conference that Google needs very few links, adding to the growing body of evidence that publishers need to focus on other factors. Gary tweeted confirmation that he indeed say those words.
Background Of Links For Ranking
Links were discovered in the late 1990’s to be a good signal for search engines to use for validating how authoritative a website is and then Google discovered soon after that anchor text could be used to provide semantic signals about what a webpage was about.
One of the most important research papers was Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon M. Kleinberg, published around 1998 (link to research paper at the end of the article). The main discovery of this research paper is that there is too many web pages and there was no objective way to filter search results for quality in order to rank web pages for a subjective idea of relevance.
The author of the research paper discovered that links could be used as an objective filter for authoritativeness.
Kleinberg wrote:
“To provide effective search methods under these conditions, one needs a way to filter, from among a huge collection of relevant pages, a small set of the most “authoritative” or ‘definitive’ ones.”
This is the most influential research paper on links because it kick-started more research on ways to use links beyond as an authority metric but as a subjective metric for relevance.
Objective is something factual. Subjective is something that’s closer to an opinion. The founders of Google discovered how to use the subjective opinions of the Internet as a relevance metric for what to rank in the search results.
What Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered and shared in their research paper (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – link at end of this article) was that it was possible to harness the power of anchor text to determine the subjective opinion of relevance from actual humans. It was essentially crowdsourcing the opinions of millions of website expressed through the link structure between each webpage.
What Did Gary Illyes Say About Links In 2024?
At a recent search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important.
Patrick Stox tweeted about what he heard at the search conference:
” ‘We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.’ @methode #serpconf2024″
Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted a confirmation of that statement:
“I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that”
Why Links Matter Less
The initial state of anchor text when Google first used links for ranking purposes was absolutely non-spammy, which is why it was so useful. Hyperlinks were primarily used as a way to send traffic from one website to another website.
But by 2004 or 2005 Google was using statistical analysis to detect manipulated links, then around 2004 “powered-by” links in website footers stopped passing anchor text value, and by 2006 links close to the words “advertising” stopped passing link value, links from directories stopped passing ranking value and by 2012 Google deployed a massive link algorithm called Penguin that destroyed the rankings of likely millions of websites, many of which were using guest posting.
The link signal eventually became so bad that Google decided in 2019 to selectively use nofollow links for ranking purposes. Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that the change to nofollow was made because of the link signal.
Google Explicitly Confirms That Links Matter Less
In 2023 Google’s Gary Illyes shared at a PubCon Austin that links were not even in the top 3 of ranking factors. Then in March 2024, coinciding with the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update, Google updated their spam policies documentation to downplay the importance of links for ranking purposes.
The documentation previously said:
“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
The update to the documentation that mentioned links was updated to remove the word important.
Links are not just listed as just another factor:
“Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
At the beginning of April Google’s John Mueller advised that there are more useful SEO activities to engage on than links.
Mueller explained:
“There are more important things for websites nowadays, and over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don’t make your website better overall”
Finally, Gary Illyes explicitly said that Google needs very few links to rank webpages and confirmed it.
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Why Google Doesn’t Need Links
The reason why Google doesn’t need many links is likely because of the extent of AI and natural language undertanding that Google uses in their algorithms. Google must be highly confident in its algorithm to be able to explicitly say that they don’t need it.
Way back when Google implemented the nofollow into the algorithm there were many link builders who sold comment spam links who continued to lie that comment spam still worked. As someone who started link building at the very beginning of modern SEO (I was the moderator of the link building forum at the #1 SEO forum of that time), I can say with confidence that links have stopped playing much of a role in rankings beginning several years ago, which is why I stopped about five or six years ago.
Read the research papers
Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment – Jon M. Kleinberg (PDF)
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Featured Image by Shutterstock/RYO Alexandre
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