Joel Acheson, founder of Ferroic, has had a career spanning the digital landscape. Joel started his search career as an SEO, later worked in data science, then moved into in a combination position, where he applied data methods and performance factors to search. He later moved into paid media, taking over a paid media group at his then-agency. The advent of programmatic marketing gave Joel the opportunity to translate data science into bidding and buying programs, leading him to build software that streamlined that bidding and buying process.
Joel says that, as he delves into SEO in his current role at Ferroic, he sees areas where the data, SEO, paid, and software elements of his career intersect — and some areas where the disciplines can learn from each other. So, what can SEO learn from paid media — and vice versa? How can the two channels supplement one another, instead of crossing wires and hitting all the same customers? To help marketers dig into those questions, Joel spoke at Found Conference about the convergence of SEO and paid search.
Where do SEO and paid media converge
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Before his firm begins developing assets and connecting clients to the marketing tools they need, Joel uses data science to identify the audience. Don’t simply decide you’re hoping to catch the attention of senior shoppers or suburban voters: think about what subset of your audience is most qualified and most interested. Consider what information users are seeking, and how your content will shift their experience.
Before pulling in software engineers and designers to reach that audience, both SEO and paid media ask the following:
How is your audience finding what they’re looking for?
Whose content are they finding currently?
What kind of content are they finding, and
Are they happy with the content that they’re finding?
Once those questions are answered, SEO and paid media operate in different ways. SEO relies on magnetic force: you create content that people want, and it pulls them into your site, through search results that match user intent. Paid search is more of a loudspeaker: a way to generate awareness that the stuff exists, broadcasting that information to anyone who may be interested, regardless of certain-match words. But, awareness and attraction aren’t mutually exclusive. How can SEO and paid media play off on the same team — and learn from one another?
How SEO and Paid Media Work Together
SEO and paid media both rely on media and tech to deliver an audience-appropriate message. They’re two sides of the user-intent coin: SEO attracts users with specific interests, and paid shows interesting content to users.
Where can SEO benefit from paid media?
Search marketers wear lots of hats. SEOs can use paid media to fill the gap between information supply and user demand — and paid search campaigns can thank SEO for attracting qualified customers.
What can SEOs benefit from paid media?
Joel says that SEOs can learn from paid media by taking diversification more seriously, and by recognizing less-qualified users. We know, we know: paid media makes a “ca-CHING” noise in the head of search optimizers. But, while we’d love to say that you can build an e-commerce empire based solely on your awesome organic performance, that may not be the case. Paid media can fill the gap between content supply and user demand. Don’t discard the lessons you learn from paid marketing, either — you may find merchandising preferences, engagement data, popular keywords, and other user-intent info through paid search.
Use these lessons from paid marketing
— and think of smart ways to make your paid budget work for you:
View paid search as a tool to generate awareness for unique and innovative products and services. This service is especially valuable if you offer products and services for which users may not be searching. You want to connect users not only to information they need, but to information they don’t yet know they need. Users searching for complimentary or competing products make for easy converts.
Consider opportunities to engage users in places they won’t discover via search engines. Each one of us only sends a small percentage of our lives in SERPs — where else do users spend their time? Where should you maximize your presence outside of Google — say, on social media or physical advertising?
Consider the value of offsite organic. Social media, review sites, and shopping sites are vital to connecting branded search terms back to your site. Capitalize on industry-specific publications, customer forums, and commonly-searched apps like Twitter and YouTube.
Use paid search to jump-start the engagement signals that feed SEO performance. Often, you launch a piece of content that isn’t getting enough traffic to generate the links, likes, and shares that search engines value as authoritativeness. Paid media gives you a chance to kick-start that process by boosting traffic to that new content.
Paid search can be a useful tool to bump SEO
In our previous post on backlinking, we discussed the value of a backlink audit. Just as you should perform a content audit regularly to make sure that your content is usable, SEO-friendly, and up-to-date, you should be checking your backlinks on the regular. So, let’s say you’re taking a deep dive into your backlinking situation: you’ve identified poor links from unwanted sites (and disavowed those that Google tells you are truly problematic), you’ve researched which pages link to you, and which of your pages are the most-linked and least-linked. So, what should you do now? And, are inbound links still worth your time?
Is backlinking still important?
Backlinking may feel outdated — older SEOs may remember using backlinking along with tactics like keyword-stuffing and microsites in the earlier days of optimization. However, backlinking is still an integral part of optimization. Google and other search engines are constantly evolving to better incorporate all of the centerpieces of rankings — content match, time spent on site, pages per session, bounce rate, and, yes, inbound links — to match searcher intent. SEMrush actually lists backlinking as the fifth most-important ranking factor for SEO.
However, you still can’t get away with crappy content — and having sheer numbers of backlinks won’t help. You need quality, relevant links, and that process takes time. Not sure whether you need to do more with backlinking? To help decide, check out your competition. By comparing your backlink profile against your competitors’, you can see where you stand.
Benchmark your backlink profile against your competitors.
1. View and download your competitor’s backlink profile.
You can employ multiple tools to check your competitors’ links: Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush, or whatever works for you. Most of these checkers allow for a certain number of free checks each year.
Review your competitors’ acquisition rate and overall number of links.
When you’re comparing your site to a competitor’s, you want to make sure you’re on a similar or higher trajectory of growth. That knowledge can inform your backlinking outreach strategy. If you just started building links within the last month, you’ll likely norway phone number library see more and more fruitful inbound links — and you may be catching or trailing your competitors, depending on when (or if!) they implemented their backlinking programs. Say you’re leading your competitors on backlinks — how do you maintain your lead? If you’re behind the curve, how can you catch up?
3. Identify negative SEO efforts or attacks.
Keep an eye out for spikes in backlinks: these can be a sign of a hack or other intentional attack, or of a link farm sending hundreds of links (and fake views) to your site in attempt to make it rank poorly.
Find out who links to your competitors — but doesn’t link to you.
When you’re analyzing your competitors’ backlinking profile, you’ll want to think about their links in the same way you think about your own: who’s linking to them the most frequently? Which pages are the most valuable for backlinking, and why? What pages resonate well with their audiences? Consider reverse-engineering their strategy: if your competitors are using awesome strategy that fits similar goals to yours, you can try to improve and perfect on that strategy.
5. Decide what to do with the information from your backlink audit.
Sometimes, after reviewing a backlink audit, you’ll still be wondering whether backlink strategy is a useful way to spend your time. Zaine says he’s performed bank email list backlink audits that uncovered that a client has far more backlinks than competitors (both search and direct), their content ranks well, and there’s not much left to do from a linking perspective. That brings us to an important step of the backlinking process: deciding whether it’s worth your time.
Comparing Backlinking Profile to Competitors
Benchmark your backlink profile to competitors’ to see whether your backlinking strategies are putting you ahead of your industry.
Determine if link-building will be a fruitful tactic for you and your team.
Link-building isn’t content or site structure: if your site is better than your competitors’, this tactic just doesn’t need to be at the top of your priority list. Creating link-building relationships can be time-consuming, and, in some cases, link building won’t really move the needle for your site. In order to weight the importance of a link-building program, you need to consider:
What is the estimated ROI?
How much higher in the SERPs do you believe that linkbuilding will push your site — and what is the value of that organic improvement? Check out our organic ROI calculator to make an educated guess on how moving one, two, or more spots in the SERPs will impact your revenue.
How much time needs to be invested? Consider how you plan to increase links. Are you doing relatively low-hanging actions, like creating a Wikipedia page for your brand, or will you need to build an affiliate program, se