Mastering Search Analytics

Chapter 5. Coordinating SEO and Paid Search

Your SEO and paid search campaigns can provide you with a more holistic model of what is happening on your site related to search.

In the grand scheme of things, some users who click paid search ads may not even realize they have done so. The fact that we refer to them as different topics does not mean that an end user distinguishes between them. Further, we can use the tactics discussed in this book to test both types of campaigns and apply what we learn across the board.

Note

I find it interesting that most companies continue to separate their SEO and paid search efforts, and even more interesting that companies continue to let the agencies that spend their paid search budgets own these strategies. The biggest value I ever saw was when we decided to separate “church and state,” if you will—meaning that we did not give the agency total control over the spend, and instead put a secondary team in place to perform auditing.

This meant that we did not get “good news” stories every week, and instead we had conversations about improving, optimizing, and driving more value. The catch-22 I think many agencies that control their own spends find themselves in is the expectation that there will be a positive ROI, when the reality is that not every hit is a home run.

The moment the agency spending our budget stopped having control over the investment was when we saw our biggest leaps. By bringing the strategy in-house and placing it under the control ...