?? Combining Paid Search (SEM) and Organic Search (SEO) Strategies: A Growth Hacking Approach ??

During my time at Commvault, I had the opportunity to build an integrated marketing team that combined the strengths of our SEO and SEM efforts. This collaboration not only reduced our SEM spend but also optimized our SEO efforts to be more pipeline-relevant. Here’s why this combined strategy is more effective and how it can help lower costs and optimize resources.

By integrating SEO and SEM into a unified strategy, we were able to achieve significant efficiencies:

1. Reduced SEM Spend: By identifying targets we could achieve organically, we eliminated unnecessary SEM costs. This allowed us to focus our paid efforts where they were truly needed.
2. Revenue-Relevant SEO: With better insights from our SEM team, our SEO efforts shifted from supporting vanity metrics to focusing on keywords that directly impacted our revenue.

Let’s dive into an example with the broad and noisy keyword "Ransomware." While relevant to Commvault, it spanned both Business and Consumer contexts, making it challenging to target effectively. Here’s how our integrated strategy tackled this:

1. SEM: We identified derivative keywords that better targeted our audience. For instance, the term "Zero Trust" was crucial in B2B Ransomware discussions but was absent in B2C vocabulary.
2. SEM: Our ads were crafted to overtly indicate who our products were for, using terms like Enterprise or Business to deter consumer clicks.
3. SEM: We used negative keywords to refine our targeting, plugging leaks by analyzing conversion reports and excluding irrelevant traffic.
4. SEO: We targeted broad keywords while mapping product benefits and value in our content, reaching a larger audience and organically filtering out non-buyers.
5. SEO: We identified ‘getable’ related keywords and mapped them against Paid Search CPC, creating a prioritized list of keywords to shift from Paid to Organic.
6. SEM: Freed-up dollars from shifting to Organic were reinvested into new search terms or doubled down on the most effective ones.

By integrating SEO and SEM, we created a more efficient and effective search strategy, driving better results with optimized resources. If you're looking to streamline your marketing efforts, consider bringing your SEO and SEM teams together. The synergy can lead to remarkable outcomes! ????

Do you look at your SEO & SEM strategy as a whole, or treat them as separate entities? Let me know in the comments what your experience has been.

#MarketingStrategy #SEO #SEM #IntegratedMarketing #DigitalMarketing #GrowthMarketing