The Power Struggle between Natural & Paid Search
By Jim Boulton, Deputy UK Managing Director
The power struggle between natural and paid search has been raging for some time. In 2009 alone, $24 billion was spent on Google AdWords. As AdWords represents approximately 85% of the paid search market, that makes the entire market worth $28 billion. According to recent research, there is an increasing shift in emphasis from natural to paid search—or ‘Sponsored links’ as Google calls them. What a mistake.
Paid search is an agile marketing technique in that it is fast, effective and can quickly demonstrate ROI. However, in reality, paid search is, in effect, short term, above-the-line advertising, the benefits of which only last as long as the investment. If you are using your budget to fund your paid search and neglecting the quality of the content that lies beneath, what happens when you stop paying? Your visitor numbers plummet. There’s a smarter way to spend your search budget.
For long-term success, it is essential to invest in editorial content. This not only automatically improves natural search rankings, but it may even inform and entertain the visitor, possibly even giving them a reason to come back! Which means more visitors, more links, improved search results and the incremental cost diminishing to almost zero. Not only that, but the natural search will continue to pick up your website—the longer the URL is live, the harder your editorial content works. Great content will spread organically across social media sites, which means even more links—benefits that are not included in the pay-per-click model. An initial investment in editorial will pay for itself many times over for years to come.
Take websites, for example. The sites that succeed (Agent Provocateur, Bang & Olufsen, Duchy Originals, The Kick Racism Out of Football Campaign, Oasis Stores, to name drop a few) are not those with the biggest marketing budgets but with the largest investment in content. The brands that respect their customers’ time, respect their investment in their brand and reward them accordingly with relevant, informative content, engender customer loyalty that very quickly turns into sales.
The smart thing to do is to use paid search tactically to augment your natural search strategy. Develop a content plan around search terms and while you’re rolling it out, use paid search to plug the gaps. Paid search is the perfect environment to experiment and establish the keywords that resonate with visitors, use it as a market research tool and then create editorial content based around those keywords. Marketing spend will go down and conversion will go up.
But beyond the commercial argument of paid vs natural search, Google is fundamentally contradicting its own manifesto. One part of their philosophy statement ‘Ten things we know to be true’, states “Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques…”.They may as well add, “failing that you can pay us to turn a blind eye”.
As more and more brands join the feeding frenzy and Google degrades its own raison d’etre in order to maximise short-term profits, pay-per-click inflation will encourage brands to rethink their approach to online marketing. In the meantime, think on this – search engines are designed to find the most relevant content based on a search term. Creating content, rather than paying Google to look the other way, will do exactly that.
(Published on FigaroDigital.com)
