It’s common for businesses to ask how SEO is going to help their paid search efforts. This is an often misunderstood relationship, and when working with Fortune 500 companies, you can’t simply say because I said so. So, I thought I’d tackle this with a three-fold approach:

1. Market Share

2. Improved Metrics

3. Revenue

Market Share

For small service-oriented or e-Commerce businesses, click-through-rate and conversions are paramount. However, for large companies, brand recognition is an equally important component of search marketing. Combining organic search with paid campaigns increases exposure for important branded and non-branded key phrases, ensuring that you are in front of your target audience at critical times. It’s pretty simple math – more listings means more chances someone will see one of your listings and associate your company with the search term. When presented with a viable opportunity to increase exposure and position your company as the industry leader, why wouldn’t you?

Improved Metrics

For those that want a metric-driven reason, I have that covered too. It’s common knowledge that Google uses something called Quality Score as a major factor in their AdWords platform. Quality Score is a numerical gauge of an ad’s relevancy. A low quality score can result in higher cost-per-click, lower positioning, or an ad not being displayed at all. In a nutshell, Google rewards relevant, high-quality ads.

A major factor in determining quality score is the relevancy of an ad’s landing page. For example, Company Z has an AdWords ad for the term “quality aerobic shoes.” When a user clicks on the ad, they are taken to a page that contains very little content and no mention of the phrase “quality aerobic shoes.” Google checks the landing page content against the ad’s content to look for relevancy. The absence of important key phrases from the landing results in a lower quality score. The lower quality score results in higher cost-per-click and/or lower ad positioning. And the merry-go-round continues. Adding keyword rich content that takes into account paid campaign efforts can improve organic visibility and quality scores.

In addition to improved quality score, evidence suggests an increase in click-through-rate when both organic and paid listings are present. A recent study by Sha Yang and Anindya Ghose at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business found that “combined click-through rates are 5.1% higher when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when only the organic listings are present.”

Revenue

Ultimately, all business goals end at the bottom line. So, perhaps the strongest argument for participating in both organic optimization (SEO) and paid search is an increase in conversion rates. Yang and Ghose’s study also demonstrates an increased conversion rate when both organic listings and paid listings are present. In fact, according to Yang and Ghose, “the combined conversion rate increases 11.7% when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when organic listings alone are present.”

If that’s not evidence enough, the study also found that “on an average, this positive interdependence leads to an increase in expected profits for [their study subject] ranging from 4.2 % to 6.15% when compared to profits in the absence of either of these.”

So, there you have it; pertinent reasons why your company must be engaged in both organic optimization and paid search strategies include: reaching more people, lowering your costs, getting more people to your web properties and improving revenue. Best of all, this is all measurable. If that’s not enough to convince you, then I’m not sure what will.

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