Clicksharp Marketing

I recently attended a lecture presented by Dominic Preuss, an ex-Product Manager for Local Advertising at Google. According to his current employer, Meetup.com, Dominic is “an expert in local advertising, search engine marketing (SEM), online monetization and search engine optimization (SEO).”

The most valuable insight I found in this discussion relates to the differentiation of SEO and SEM. According to Dominic, it’s really quite simple: SEO is the left side of Google, and SEM is the right. In other words, a pure duality. Organic vs. sponsored. Unpaid vs. paid. And if you look at the acronym, the implication would be: Optimization vs. Marketing.

However, one might weigh in differently on the topic, and suggest that an SEO campaign’s ability to impact branding, consumer engagement, channel strategy, promotional strategy and so on in fact make it very germane to the concept of marketing, and by extension, SEM.

But Dominic’s point was a different one, which he illustrated with a fictitious scenario.

If your SEO campaign helps you rank #1 for a specific term (we’ll use the example of “swiss army knife”), this ranking might generate 100 unique visitors per day to your website.

And if you run an advertising campaign on Google AdWords, and you reach the #1 position among the sponsored links, that might send 10 unique visitors per day to your site. (Notice that in many cases, the #1 ad appears in the “one-box” at the very top.)

BUT–if you rank #1 on both the left and the right, the sum of that traffic is not 110. According to Dominic, it would be closer to 130 or 140.

Why is this? Apparently the concurrent top placement in both organic and paid search results creates a synergistic appeal which makes users more likely to click on either link. It’s as if the pairing of these top placements generates an additional dose of authority for your website. In fact, it’s been proven.

Call it what you want: SEO can be looked at as a counterpart to SEM, or just another element therein. But the resulting insight is what is most important. For a small business–particularly one which is making its first inroads into digital marketing–it pays to invest in optimization and advertising as a unified part of your marketing strategy.

~~~~~

Paul Burani
Clicksharp Marketing

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 @ 12:54 pm on the category Marketing Theory, Pay-per-click advertising, SEM, SEO, Small business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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