Define an acquisition strategy requires flexibility, that is, you must adapt to your targets, the purchasing paths they are looking for and the needs you must meet. Even if it means pivoting 3 times in terms of content, messages, added value or positioning. It is illusory to think that the first version will be the good strategy.There are numerous acquisition levers. The best known are the SEA for Search Engine Advertising, and the SEO to Search Engine Optimization. In fact, we've written an article about why you should Choosing between Facebook and Google Ads depending on your goals. However, there are other levers, such as street marketing, e-mailing or even sending SMS, which are marketing levers more traditional. Be careful, they are not less effective because depending on your target, you will sometimes have no choice but to participate in fairs and conventions to meet prospects.So you want to accelerate your acquisition strategy and you are thinking of Do SEA ? Do you want to know if SEA is compatible with your marketing levers existing ones such as SEO?
In this article, we will study this complementarity between SEA and SEO in order to define how it is possible to migrate to a global SEM strategy, Social Engine Marketing.
We will start by evaluating the pros and cons of SEO and SEA, in order to assess their complementarity.
The premise behind search engine strategies is to provide users with relevant online resources, and that the content is actually relevant to the query they made. When people search for information, search engines try to present the most relevant information possible. For be well positioned, the secret is to always provide the most qualitative response among all those on the web.
We're not going to hide it, the SEO is the cheapest way to have visibility, that is, Google will not ask you to pay to appear in the results.However, SEO requires time and intense effort to develop a relevant presence on the web, which is a cost in itself.But let's still note that appearing in search results is a proof of trust for Internet users. They prefer to click on a result from natural traffic (when they know the difference) .All the work done for the referencing a site remains for life provided that the algorithms do not change the positioning criteria. The advantage of being well positioned on a request with volume is that you will always have traffic. All you have to do is convert it with all the incentives you will put in place, but that is not the subject of this article. 🙂
The real problem with SEO is lack of control on the guidelines imposed by search engines. For example, it is recommended to follow hundreds of practices on a site, but Google can very well make an update that will cancel 6 months later, key elements that mattered previously. Plus, you have no control over what your competitors do, over your past, and over the constant evolution of Google's preferences for results and presentation of research results (position 0, rich snippets, etc.) .Google is still quite vague about the use of formulas for referencing a site. Although we know the practices that Google likes to see, there is nothing specific about what to put in place to get your website to be in first position.
It is often said that slowness and consistency pay off. You may not see much progress for weeks or months. You should also realize that SEO is not for everyone, if the competition is too intense, you will have to spend significant budgets to get more visibility every week.Becoming the most relevant website for a specific query, especially competitive research, can take time (6 months, 1 year, 3 years, etc.). Be ready to invest time and money in results that will be exponential months later.
Paid traffic can take many forms, with ads on search engines, via Google Ads and Bing Ads for example, or with ads on social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter.This type of traffic is very often billed on a cost-per-click basis, where customers only pay for users who clicked on their ad. We immediately understand the advantage of not making anyone want to click on paid ads.
Thanks to an accurate billing system, you can establish budgets and limit your daily expenses to ensure that you do not exceed your initial budget. Likewise, you can manage the expenses for each keyword to help you target relevant keywords using all your data collected on the website in question.
There are a multitude of campaign management tools to refine and personalize your targets, in order to target the audiences that suit you the most. You can control who gets your ads, making every dollar spent much more effective.
There's tons of data behind paid research. Creating goals and conversions (especially for e-commerce sites) can help you establish a direct link between your marketing spend and your sales and thus improve your conversion rate.
Need traffic as of next Monday? As soon as you have set up your campaigns, you will get the investments you pay for, and all that immediately! You no longer have a budget? Your ads stop...
There are a multitude of parameters, targeting, and optimization strategies that can be used to get profitable campaigns.Organizing and developing a strategy can take time and require real expertise, which is why it is strongly recommended to entrust this task to an SEA agency with expertise in the field.
Increased competition in all markets has increased costs per click. Businesses with big budgets tend to occupy the dominant positions, leaving little room for smaller businesses. [sc name="img-googleads-quiz-dark”]
Get the most out of your SEO strategy and of your SEA strategy is essential to aim for the right places in the results of sponsored link campaigns. To do this, several criteria common to these two types of referencing must be taken into account.
In SEO as in SEA, the core of the strategy is based on the search intentions of Internet users. Focus on the right keywords is therefore essential to both methods and can serve as a basis for thought.On the one hand, one can bid more on larger and more competitive keywords, on the other hand, one can naturally optimize its positioning on more accurate keywords and long trails. Even better, you can regularly adjust this keyword distribution by increasing bids on lower keywords in natural referencing or by lowering them for higher ranking keywords.
Content is one of the fundamental pillars of natural referencing And of theInbound marketing. Optimizing keywords in the text of your web pages is a basic principle for positioning yourself in the search results of engines like Google. The semantic richness of your landing page will also improve the quality score of the campaign by bringing much more relevance between the content and that of the ads. In addition, the content created to boost your natural referencing strategy can be used as the basis for numerous paid campaigns. For example, creating a white paper can attract traffic to an article and the website, but also to allow email addresses to be collected via the download form, which can then be reused later in retargeting campaigns.
A technically efficient website that facilitates the accessibility of your pages to search engine robots is beneficial from all points of view. En natural referencing, it ensures a good exploration of your pages and content in order to better index them.In terms of paid search, the technical quality of a web page has a positive influence on the Quality score of ads, which ultimately allows you to have a lower cost per click than your competitors.
It is on this point that the complementarity SEO & SEA makes perfect sense. Indeed, paid search makes it possible to gain visibility instantly, depending on the budget applied to the campaigns. Natural referencing, on the other hand, will take longer to produce its effects, but will have an impact in the long term. The traffic generated by SEA will cost you money directly (and always) while that generated by SEO will be free (indirectly) .The interest of thinking about your acquisition strategy by combining SEO and SEA is to push your new web content at first via short-term advertising campaigns. Once your content has gained traffic, popularity, and runs naturally in search engine results, then you will reduce your advertising expenses by taking advantage of a good SEO positioning in the long term.This mode of operation will allow you to better manage your ROI throughout the deployment of your online marketing strategy.
The trend nowadays is SEM, that is to say to Search Engine Marketing, which includes SEO, SEA and SMO (Search Media Optimization). This strategy makes it possible to appear on all the most used search engines and to get people talking about you. new audiences.The ideal is obviously to try to set up these three main channels, even if it is a bit utopian when budgets are tight. But, this makes it possible to compensate for the decrease in traffic from one of acquisition sources and to compensate for it by others as the months go by. Will reality require you to adapt your goals and resources to a single strategy: do you have a dedicated budget and want to appear quickly on the SERPs? Start SEA with Google Ads. Do you have time but don't have the resources? Go for SEO or SMO, and focus on the long term.