Learn how to integrate SEO and paid search into your marketing strategy in order to avoid unnecessary spending, have a unified brand message, and achieve sustainable long-term growth.

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Hi, friends. Welcome to another episode of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Grace Frohlich, and I'm an SEO consultant at Brainlabs, and today I want to talk about how to integrate SEO and paid search into your marketing strategy.

First, let's talk about why you should have a holistic search strategy. There are two main goals for integrating the channels. The short-term goal is avoiding unnecessary spend and having a unified brand messaging. And in the long term, we aim to achieve sustainable growth over time.

You see, paid search is dependent on a consistent level of investment to maintain performance, while organic search builds incremental growth over time that does not depend on maintaining that same level of investment.

So when you integrate and have a holistic approach, you can invest less while growing value over time.

Now, you might be wondering, “Why don't more of us have a holistic approach?” Well, working together can be a struggle because of certain challenges.

It's quite common and not unexpected that people don't have a full working knowledge of another channel. Often, even the most experienced execs aren't familiar with organic search landscape and vice versa, and it's likely that we have different ways of working. For example, I know that some paid search execs aren't as familiar with top-of-funnel strategy and the nuances of search intent.

As a result, we might not know how to show the benefits of a holistic approach and to prove that it's worth that effort.

Well, this is the problem that I'm going to help you solve today. I'll talk you through my search integration playbook and help you kick-start your holistic strategy.

Step one, get to know the other channel. A good place to start is to open up dialogue between SEO and PPC teams. You'll learn more about each channel's previous campaigns, projects, and initiatives.

A good way to do this is to ask other teams about current campaigns or projects that they're working on. What are the goals that these campaigns aim for? Are you running campaigns on specific products? Were you able to hit your targets, or were there blockers? You can uncover some issues where the other channel can help you solve.

Talk about your challenges and pain points. This can help you find common ground.

Step two, share your data. Let's talk through some of the key metrics and data points you should cover. Of course, you can add other data that you think will be helpful.

SEO

For SEO, share high-performance keywords with the paid team. Look at keywords that had the most organic clicks, sessions, conversions, and that drove the most growth. This is helpful because paid keywords are generally more bottom funnel and transactional, so they have a more narrow view. Organic can help them by uncovering new and emerging keyword data.

Another thing to share is optimized organic landing pages. Pages where we've optimized metadata and on-page elements can help improve quality score, which can help reduce cost per click.

PPC

Now, let's talk about paid search data. We can start with Google Ads. Look at the search terms report. This report shows which keywords actual users searched. Focus on conversion rates and cost per conversion. You can download this data into a spreadsheet and find high converting keywords that actual users clicked on. This can help you fill any gaps in your organic keyword list.

For example, many e-comm searches will be split by gender, men and women. If your website sells shampoo for men and women, audience data can tell us which is more likely to convert and, therefore, where we should invest. An example is shampoo for men versus shampoo for women.

Another thing to share is paid landing pages, especially pages that have been tested. For example, often paid search will do testing on title tags. Now, they call them headlines. That data can be very helpful for when you optimize the organic landing pages.

Next, step three, align your roadmaps. The aim of this is to sync with each other and become more efficient. Look at upcoming campaigns and priorities. We want more visibility on the others' campaigns and potentially support and feed into them.

You can share projects that are coming down the pipe for each of your channels. Of course, you can take it a step further and have a joint roadmap. This will help your teams be consistently in sync.

Step four: Form a plan. This will help ensure that everyone is working towards the same thing. Treat this like a mini pitch. It'll help have a clear focus and show a united front when you present to stakeholders.

First, choose your objectives. Decide together what those are. A common and primary objective is to increase revenue, which every business wants. But you can also have a secondary objective, like improving brand awareness. Whichever one you choose, decide what they are together. This is a good opportunity to work collaboratively across departments and set common goals.

Next, create a joint forecast. The easiest way to do this is to forecast traffic per channel separately — the organic traffic and paid traffic. Then, combine them into one view like this. For example, you can forecast traffic for key pages separately, combine them into one visual, and forecast percentage uplift as a combined metric. The main reason we do this is to show a unified front.

Step five: Measure and report. Plan out how you'll measure the results. Remember, we should show the benefits of a holistic approach. Now, which metrics should each channel track?

Some shared channel metrics are clicks, impressions, and conversion rate. You can also report on combined metrics, like share of voice.

Also, decide how often you want to report those metrics, whether that's weekly, biweekly, or monthly.

One thing that can make measurement easier is building a joint dashboard. This way, you can track all the metrics in one place. Now, there are some holistic dashboard templates that you can search for and download. This is a nice to have, but not necessary.

And there you have it, the search integration playbook. I'll link below a handy checklist that has all of these steps so that you can begin your own holistic search strategy. Thank you.

Download Grace’s handy checklist