Combine your SEO and SEA Strategies to Maximise Your Performance and Increase Your Visibility
The starting point of Search Marketing, SEO as well as SEA, is none other than the ability to translate an intention: the will of a user to obtain information to meet a need. This intention will materialise in the form of searches on the web, via a succession of requests.
These famous keywords, which are increasingly transformed into questions, will create a set of "Search" actions, which, combined or not with other actions (on social networks, in shops, etc.) or exhibitions (in online or offline media) will constitute what is known as the customer journey. CyberCité agency explains how a convergent strategy between SEO and SEA promotes performance.
Behind the search, a will
Google's main goal is to provide an answer and to deal with the different intentions and signals of its users. The latter evolve according to the context: current events, period, places, etc. The aim of the American giant? To respond in as many cases as possible, in the best way, to as many people as possible, and by returning the best possible information. In other words, Google's algorithm seeks to understand the "intention" behind the query made and to do so as quickly as possible.
The visible result, i.e. the proposed response from Google to these queries, is the SERP (Search Engine Result Page), which is displayed in three different ways: SEO / SEA / Google Services. From the outset, we can therefore see that on this same medium, organic and paid results coexist, and make it possible to jointly increase your visibility coverage.
At the same time, Google is trying to respond by itself to the various requests of Internet users: it, therefore, offers increasingly reduced visibility coverage on increasingly complex queries. Its takeover of the informational dimension is obvious: weather, culture, sports, tourism, etc. Google is taking the lion's share of the cake and becoming everyone's competitor. At the same time, the line between organic and paid search is blurrier than ever. It is becoming difficult for Internet users to detect what comes under sponsored links, and more generally under advertising, especially as other Google services are adding to the complexity. Transparency for the end user is therefore not obvious!
How do we get to you?
In this context, it is essential for advertisers to analyse and understand the audience brought to their site by Google, via convergent datasets, so as not to draw the wrong conclusions in the event of audience variations on a lever. In particular, it is necessary to be able to identify :
SEO/SEA audience volumes linked to brand awareness: to be combined into a single block of awareness traffic, the fluctuations of which depend more on the context and your overall popularity/awareness than on real performance in search marketing.
Themes or keywords on which :
SEO/SEA share visibility
Only SEO brings visibility
Only advertising campaigns can bring an audience
Expert opinion: "By creating common data sets, you will have a better ability to identify strong themes on the one hand, and on the other hand those that require a financial or editorial effort to improve your audience, and of course your conversions. This will allow you to manage your actions in a global way, on a single medium: the Google environment, on the one hand, in order to minimise cannibalisation, and on the other hand to maximise the chances of obtaining an incremental audience." - Alban Renard, Head of CyberCité's Expertise Unit
Search: Trawling or precision shooting?
In search marketing, the complexity of targeting is therefore related to the ambiguity of queries: for example, what hidden intention lies behind a “CRM"? :
The novice student looking for a definition, "what is CRM?
The more transactional intention of a professional: "I want to buy CRM software for my company"?
Google also displays its own disambiguation blocks on the SERP from the outset, such as the "Knowledge graph", which, located on the right-hand side of the page, is a sort of "first aid information", or the PAA (People Also Ask), which encourages the Internet user to requalify his or her request with more precise questions.
Moreover, some terms can be ambivalent:
CRM = Customer Relationship Management
RCMP = Royal Canadian Mounted Police
A single answer is therefore impossible without a context.
The SEO channel will therefore inevitably be very affected by the most generic and ambiguous terms. The SEA channel is a real force of power and will therefore "hack" the SERP and impose a very transformation-oriented message, without having a mountain of editorial content at its disposal. It is also a great way to gather specific and targeted audiences in a sea of irrelevant requests, in order to be able to retarget them afterwards.
The most effective convergent strategy is therefore to cast a wide net to ensure that you reach the entire relevant audience. SEO and content marketing are the first means of achieving this, while SEA will enable a sales pitch to be made at the top of the funnel.
As far as SEA and the Google advertising network are concerned, for several years now, the firm from Mountain View has been moving towards "automation", with increasingly broad targeting: Google now identifies the meaning behind the keywords much better and can therefore automatically manage a growing number of combinations of terms. It is then that the algorithm will refine to find the most useful audience.
Expert opinion: "DSAs (Dynamic Search Ads) save a lot of time on the long tail, by automatically retrieving information present on the site (Title, description, URL, hence the need for a well-optimised SEO! ), while RSAs (Responsive Search Ads) will allow you to serve ads with the best combinations of messages in terms of conversions, and therefore automatically optimise your acquisition costs (Target CPA), or your return on advertising investment (Target ROAS)". - Alban Renard, Head of CyberCité's Expertise Unit
SEO and SEA: True or false twins?
SEO and SEA have much more in common than they seem:
An identical distribution medium, with visibility spaces that vary over time, sometimes interchangeably
Strategies with often similar performance issues, despite a different relationship to time
Identical or similar data providers, with indispensable interconnections
A confrontation with Google's AI and machine learning based mainly on customer journey analysis
In conclusion, it is important to remember that SEO and SEA are two very different but totally complementary professions! Using the ROI/ROAS vision of SEA and applying it strongly to SEO, and also using the technicality of SEO in the knowledge and optimisation of digital ecosystem workflows will ensure maximum performance in your search marketing campaigns