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By Scott Buresh
Holistic: [adj]
Emphasizing the importance of the whole and the interdependence
of its parts.
Holistic Theory: [noun]
The theory that the parts of any whole should be considered
in relation to the whole, and that the whole is greater
than the sum of its parts.
Although the word “holistic”
is often used to describe a particular approach to
medicine (in which the emphasis is on treatment of
the “whole” individual), it is also appropriate
to apply it to other disciplines, including Search
Engine Marketing (SEM). There are three major components
of SEM (and many minor ones, but we won’t touch
on them here). These three primary parts are often
used individually to great effect- but it is only
when they are effectively used in unison that the
“whole” can become “greater than
the sum of its parts”. These major components
are as follows:
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Pay-Per-Click (also referred to as Pay for Performance)
is very close to a pure form of advertising. Companies
bid to have their ad copy show up for specific search
terms related to their business. This ad copy usually
shows up in a special section of the search engine
results page, typically labeled as “Sponsored”.
Companies that use PPC are rewarded with targeted
visitors to their websites and have to pay the bid
amount for each visitor they receive.
Natural Search Engine Optimization
(SEO)
Natural search engine results are often considered
to be more trustworthy than PPC advertising by searchers
who understand the difference. These purportedly non-biased
results can be likened to the articles in a trade
magazine, while “Sponsored” results can
be likened to the advertisements. A company that is
mentioned in an article will usually garner a more
favorable impression than a company that is simply
advertising in the same magazine.
Website Conversion
The most often overlooked of the three components,
website conversion is equal in importance to the other
two. Conversion is the art and science of determining
predominant user behavior on your website and trying
to improve it - in other words, attempting to influence
visitors to take a specific action on your site that
eventually leads to a sale.
How They Work Together
While each of the above components by themselves can
return excellent results, the power of each is multiplied
when they are used effectively together. The results
returned by any combination of the three pieces applied
simultaneously will almost always outperform the collective
results of the same pieces applied separately.
PPC with SEO:
Recent studies have indicated that search engine marketing
is an effective brand builder, and this branding effect
is amplified through placement in both the natural
search results and in the paid results. This makes
perfect sense - on most search engines, you have two
unique opportunities to present your company and products/services
for every search query. By taking advantage of both
opportunities, you greatly increase your chances of
being first-in-mind from the searcher’s perspective,
at the time of the search and beyond.
There is a very popular approach
from some search engine marketers to only use PPC
for keyphrases where the site does not achieve high
natural rankings. While this approach can certainly
save money, it runs counter to the branding benefit
espoused above (since it ensures that a site listing
will either be in the paid results or the natural
results, but never both). If your company has a high
average dollar sale, and you have a chance to favorably
impress a visitor with dual exposure before they visit
your site, it usually makes sense to take that opportunity.
SEO and/or PPC with Website
Conversion:
Often, firms are willing to spend many thousands of
dollars to increase traffic to their site, but not
a penny on website conversion. In a medium that makes
it so easy for a searcher to look elsewhere, conversion
is critical - and the net effect of raising your conversion
rate from one to two percent is the same as doubling
your traffic (and in one sense it is actually better,
since it means that far fewer people have left your
site unsatisfied). Conversion naturally works independently
of any SEM initiative (provided that your website
gets any traffic at all). But the combined effect
of increasing your conversion rate and your traffic
naturally yields more impressive results. Say, for
example, that your website currently provides you
with only two solid sales leads per week. By doubling
your conversion rate, you will get four leads, and
doubling your traffic on top of that will yield eight.
However, the above example does
not take into account the quality of search engine
traffic from targeted keyphrases. It is often the
case that current site traffic is not particularly
targeted (a look into a site’s web logs will
often reveal a large number of search engine-referred
visitors that found the site using non-targeted phrases).
It is not uncommon to see conversion rates skyrocket
as the quality of traffic improves due to targeted
keyphrase advertising or organic search engine optimization.
With PPC campaigns, you can further boost conversion
rates by sending visitors to highly targeted landing
pages- another example of how seemingly separate disciplines
can complement each other so well.
The Bottom Line
The fact that these components are most effective
when used in concert does not mean that each should
not be tracked individually- of course they should.
But do not be surprised when your returns on two or
more of these disciplines used together are greater
than the combined returns from the individual components
used separately. And this presents a dilemma- a highly
successful holistic SEM approach can make extracting
exact ROI figures for each individual component difficult,
since “the whole” has become “greater
than the sum of its parts”. But as many savvy
companies are discovering, this is a nice problem
to have.
© Medium Blue 2007
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