Have you ever wondered why your search marketing efforts are not bearing fruit? The probabiliy of your search marketing initiatives missing as much as 80 % of your target audience is quite high.

Why?

The reasons are not difficult to depict. The natural or organic search results are responsible for about 70% to 80% of all clicks. Sponsored listings or PPC is responsible for the remaining 20% to 30%. However, despite this, the B2B marketers give more priority to their PPC campaigns.

One cannot disown the fact that most businesses today participate in both PPC and SEO; however, there are many B2B marketers that are more into stepping up their PPC initiatives than anything else. The results of PPC are evident in a short span of time, and this can be really gratifying for the businesses involved. The capmaign adjustments that are made today get reflected in the results tomorrow and so, and the SEO campaigns are ignored to some extent.

To improve the overall performance though, leveraging both PPC as well as SEO initiatives are important. The integration of these campaigns is necesary for the success of the Internet marketing campaign. The successful inrtegration of the PPC and the SEO campaigns is not easy though. There are three common integration mistakes that marketers need to be aware of. As marketers, you need to avoid these three pitfalls while bringing your PPC and SEO campaigns together.

Lack of Cross communication

One of the most common pitfalls in the integration process is the lack of communication between the two teams – one responsible for the PPC initiatives and the other for the SEO campaign. The search marketing efforts of organisations can fall off track if there is a “divide and conquer” modus operandi in place. A team of people would be responsible for SEO and a compeletely different team would be accountable for PPC. In large organisations, this could have a negative impact; inconsistent programs would be produced where different priorities are assigned to different keywords. Also, in such a scenario, all the paid and organic listings would not be receiving the same promimence. The inconsistencies in creative messaging could confuse the visitors to the site and lead to marked differences in the landing pages.

Given such a scenario, what does an Internet marketer do? I would suggest that a centralizing of the search function would be of help here. However, if there is no option for centralizing the search functionality, the best alternative would be to increase cross communication. Results can be improved to a significant extent by sharing data across campaigns.

You might see that certain terms are showing great results for your PPC campaign; you can then use this data in your SEO campaign. The terms that are underperforming in the SERPs should also not be incorporated in the PPC campaign. The smart marketers would test the creative messages on the PPC campaigns and use the information so gained to develop the Meta Data for the SEO campaigns. This way, they can entice their targetted customers to click through.

Failure to comprehend strengths

It is best to leverage the strengths of each program while you are integrating the two. You could want to make a short term promotion; in such an instance, you should be concentrating on your PPC initiatives. The speed and flexibility of such an initiative would best suit your objective. You can control the start and stop dates, select the exact messages that you want to deliver, and step up the volume for the expected end of quarter rush.

On the other hand, SEO is great for driving large volumes of traffic through content optimisation. You can optimise your core terms in SEO and ensure that you get consistent placements in the SERPs, which is necessary for driving traffic. One could also leverage SEO to get more immediate results by optimising for image and video search. You can gain traction in these areas more easily as compared to the conventional SEO methods.

Improper understanding

As marketers, you much also understand what each program delivers; a failure to do so can put your integration process off track. To avoid this pitfall, you must have a clear understanding of the specific goals of PPC as well as SEO. There should also be a proper plan in place to measure the results of each campaign individually and some sort of accountability in the internal performance at your end.

More often than not, the organisations – both large and small – do not keep a track of these elements, which in turn works against the integration of their SEO and PPC efforts.

To conclude, I can say that a successful integration of SEO and PPC campaigns is a potent combination. And you can do well to avoid the pitfalls that I have mentioned above. This way, you can integrate your search efforts, improve your overall performance, and help your organisation to reach its full potential.