• by Ben Perry , December 18, 2006

The silence was deafening. She just sat there, arms crossed, rigid, intent on staring out the window.  Across the room her husband slouched in a massive chair, scanning the ceiling--his head tilted back in despair. 

Scenes like this are played out thousands of time every day in the offices of marriage counselors around the globe.  And just as a marriage counselor needs to develop and implement the skills necessary to address the "relationship issues" caused by couples' conflicting wants and needs, search marketers implementing both paid and organic search initiatives must do the same.  How so?  In many ways, integrating the two is analogous to marriage.  For starters, it sounds like a great idea and everyone is excited about it--but ultimately it's not so easy to make it work.

Communication. When a troubled couple shows up for the first time, a natural first question for a counselor to ask would be why they were coming for therapy.  More often than not, "communication problems" is part of the answer.  Similarly, this also seems to be the central difficulty with integrating paid and organic search.  Specifically, each side needs to share its data.  Without a doubt, this is the first and most important step that needs to be taken to make this relationship work.  While this data can take many forms, let's take a look at a few that shouldn't be overlooked:

1. Keywords. Target the best-converting and highest-traffic-driving paid keywords on organic, and target the high-converting organic keywords in paid. Use organic search referral data to expand your keyword set, and to find new negative keywords.  Organic search data can also be used to determine traffic and conversion trends over time, which you can then leverage in your paid campaign.

2. Ad/Listing Copy. Use the best performing ads from your paid campaign to inform the creation of your title and description meta tags on your site. Better yet, if you're using paid inclusion, use your paid inclusion campaign as a test bed for which title/description copy works best, because searchers often respond differently to paid than they do to organic copy.

3. Landing Pages. Use the results from your paid search landing page tests to improve all the pages of your site because organic visitors can enter your site just about anywhere. Look for keywords in your paid search campaign that are very valuable but not adequately represented in your site content. Develop content specifically for them. Do you get a decent amount of traffic and/or conversions from very deep pages of your site? That may be an indication that you need to create or expand on a long-tail strategy with your paid campaign.

Cooperation. Now, if you think it's hard to get communication down, just try to get a couple of love-scorned people to cooperate and act more appropriately. Such is also the challenge with search campaigns.  Once you've shared the data, you need to make it actionable, with the following elements:  

1. Position Strategy. On each of your important keywords, test whether there is an interaction effect of placing a paid ad alongside the organic listing. Don't make the assumption that your paid campaign is cannibalizing your organic campaign. Test it and see. I've seen situations where having both produced more clicks than the sum of the parts. Also, use paid search to test keywords for which it is very difficult to attain a good organic ranking. You may decide that it isn't worth the effort, or you may decide that the volume to be gained is worth redirecting resources to your organic campaign.

2. Targeting. There is a wealth of information in your organic search referral data. Use it to determine which engines are worth targeting in paid. Use it to determine which sites might produce good traffic from contextual ads, and which sites you should take out of your contextual paid campaign. Even if an engine doesn't make that functionality available in its interface, ask your search marketing partner (directly to the engine or via your agency) to do it anyway.

3. Business Intelligence. Last but not least, use the information from all sources to improve your overall online marketing efforts. Monitor competitor's paid ads for changes in their promotions or strategy. Monitor your organic data for new engines or other potential traffic sources. Compare organic data to paid over the same time periods to identify possible fraud in paid search. When optimizing multiple divisions of a company, use organic search to help multiple divisions shown on the same keyword. This will help you to dominate the page and get around paid search rules that prohibit multiple divisions from bidding on the same keyword.

Granted, a lot of these recommendations may seem like common sense, but ask yourself if you're actually doing them--just thinking about it won't make a difference.  And remember, communication is a two-way street; it requires an exchange of information.  Lastly, communication is only as good as the cooperation that follows.  If you don't put it into action, it's pointless. 

In the end, the successful integration of paid and organic search is no different than any other important relationship--if it's going to survive and prosper, it needs communication and cooperation.  Follow these simple rules to avoid conflict, and to enable both sides to flourish.