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?

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December 7, 2009 Google launched real-time results and it changed the world of SEO as we all knew it. After reading the news and experiencing it for myself, I was left with a few questions. Does the change present more positive or negative implications to the art and science of SEO?  How do I, as an online marketer specializing in SEO, continue to tout to clients the value of SEO and importance of showing up in organic search?  In regards to whether the implications are positive or negative, as usual in the world of SEO, it’s a draw. Depending on who you talk to, the answer can go either way. On the other topic though, the vote was almost unanimous; we maintain our value by refocusing what we report as important, and draw inferences on visibility and rank.

So, what is important?  Traffic volume and conversions are now the two most important data points of interest.  We continue to build trust and value with our clients by proving to them, through data, how our efforts are impacting these metrics.  This puts visibility in the area of “inference.”  One can infer that if traffic and conversions are increasing in Google, then one has a pretty good ranking in the results.  Along with traffic volume and conversions, we should also focus on engagement (time spent on site), bounce rate and link popularity. This is a more streamlined approach to reporting which highlights activity that is relevant to the client.

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While out on Search Engine Land yesterday, getting my daily SEO fix, I came across Danny Sullivan’s retort to a post that bad mouthed SEO.  As I was reading the title, my initial thought was, “Why are people always picking on SEO?”  Then, I decided not to play the victim and moved to a more protector frame of mind and asked, “Who is this person and do they even know what they’re talking about?”  So, after reading Danny’s very thought provoking, yet “in your face” comeback with his real-life case studies, I decided to go and read this post for myself….I was left speechless.

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By now, you probably know the importance of appropriate landing pages for a paid search ad. If you don’t, here it is in one word; Outrider’s motto…RELEVANCE. Searchers do not want to spend time crawling through your site to find what they’re looking for.

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It’s the last day of SES for me, and while my head is still a little left brain heavy, I am excited about all the new information that I’ve absorbed. This was my first SES conference, and while I came here almost completely unbiased on what to expect, I was prepared for the salesy, hit or miss session content, blah, blah, blah…that I had heard prior to leaving St. Louis.

I’m happy to report that aside from the awful daily helping of carnival food, I found this to be the best conference I’ve attended in the last three years. Not a diss to SMX or anything like that, I’m just saying that I was impressed. The SEO sessions that were my favorite all had this continued focus on understanding what the search engines are looking for and what techniques and tools are out there to help you meet those expectations. It wasn’t just about how to rank well, but also, how to convert well. I think this idea of “conversion” has become somewhat of a paradigm shift for SEO. I know when I first got into the business it was all about being in the top 10; rarely did you hear emphasis being placed on conversions.

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