Many companies get tempted to stop their paid campaigns when their organic rankings are doing well and improving website traffic.
While this might be a good idea for certain household brand names, most of the time, people that use certain queries in search engines get a variety of results in SERPs, including paid search ads.
Those two things can help companies increase the amount of space they take up on a search engine results page.
Paid and Organic Search Efforts
The reason why brands take up as much space as possible in search engine results pages is to get consumers to see their name enough times. This is what primes consumers for purchasing because the more familiar they become with a brand’s name, the more likely they are to make purchases from that brand.
That’s why companies should be utilizing both organic and paid search, as that’s what allows them to take up the most available space in SERPs.
To put it simply, if a company’s organic listings are operating all by themselves, and there aren’t any paid search efforts being made, that company might get 100 website visitors.
Now, that same company can instead have paid search efforts that are running for a number of keywords, without any organic presence in SERPs, which can also get the business 100 website visitors. But if both of those search efforts are working together, the company will get a lot more than 100 website visitors.
Assessing Paid Search Efforts
First of all, companies need to establish a benchmark for paid search efforts, which is done by reviewing any relevant KPIs according to the channel. Those KPIs can include anything from the number of conversions to the number of visitors, or even their website sessions. Ideally, businesses can analyze the KPIs for organic search on a search engine like Google or Yahoo.
This helps companies evaluate their organic search efforts. Then, paid search efforts should be paused for between one and three weeks.
During this time, it’s important to still keep track of all the same metrics, for both paid and organic search efforts. Although the paid efforts are going to be practically none, it’s important to take note of them to ensure the quality of the assessment.
After the test period, the business can return to the normally paid search efforts for as long as the pause lasted. Then, all of the results of the KPIs can be evaluated once again, to help companies identify the different benefits that both of those search efforts provide.
Making Changes
If a company has noticed that there hasn’t been a big decrease in the important metrics and KPIs during the paused phase of the testing and assessment procedure, it might be smart to scale back its paid search efforts. But it’s also important to note that this isn’t the case for most businesses, which is why many need to have both paid and organic search efforts working in conjunction.
Ronn Torossian is the CEO and Founder of 5W Public Relations. Torossian is also the author of leading PR Book ‘For Immediate Release’.
