Boost Organic & Paid Traffic: How To Bring Your SEO & SEM Teams Together

Are you Team SEO or Team SEM?

What if we told you that by combining these two forces, you could boost both SEO & SEM at the same time?

You’ll be happy to know – you can.

But first, let’s make sure you have a solid foundation.

On September 14, I moderated a webinar by Michael Bruh, VP & Head of Account Success at Conductor, and Daniel Olduck, CEO & Founder of LibbyInside.

They demonstrated how to build a strong, synergistic organic and paid foundation that maximizes your marketing team’s ROI.

Here is a summary of the webinar. To access the entire presentation, complete the form.

Key Takeaways

To bring your SEO & SEM teams together and see success you should focus on:

• Process: Form a task force, and create a meeting cadence (start weekly, move to bi-weekly then monthly).
• People: Be the champion, and find your counterpart on the SEO/Paid Search team.
• Technology: Tech drives agility and data-driven insights. Create a dashboard to share data and insights.
• Metrics: Create synergy metrics, and put a stake in the ground on goals. Measure and materialize.

Create Cross-Team Business Goals For Synergy

For an organization to work better, you’ll need to create an in-house committee or task force that meets regularly.

Ideally, the task force should comprise the following:

• SEO lead.
• Paid lead.
• Content lead.
• Web dev lead.

You can then create efficiencies by sharing insights and identifying the critical drivers to create your goals.

[Find out why people and process are the two most critical parts] Instantly access the webinar →

Create A Synergy Plan Outline

When you map synergy-centric deliverables alongside the SEO efforts list, you’ll want to ensure it focuses on driving cross-channel insights.

Successful synergy is:

• Actionable.
• Impactful.
• Repeatable.
• As simple as possible.

Set up a feedback loop to take insights and action for both PPC and SEO teams.

Conductor, September 2022

[See it in action] Instantly access the webinar →

As you’re doing these holistic synergy exercises, take note that you’ll:

• See that organic/paid traffic ratios may shift as you execute.
• Monitor the impact of paid, organic, and direct together.
• Perform tests in specific geographies to isolate data.

Once the teams are aligned, you can go into building business cases around your SEO success.

Leverage Actionable Use Cases That Breakdown Silos

To break down silos, try these five techniques.

1. Create Keyword Clusters

Creating different clusters of keywords based on the actions you intend to take is a good starting point for most brands.

You immediately orient all teams in terms of the action outputs before you even get into the keywords.

Here are the keyword clusters and what you need to pay attention to:

High Spend & Good SEO

• Compare landing pages.
• Explore synergy testing.

Gaps In SEO & PPC Data

• SEO tools.
• Tests on PPC.

High Spend & Poor SEO

• New SEO content.
• Evaluate PPC relevancy.

High Spend, “Striking Distance” SEO

• SEO tweaks on pages.
• Review “Quality Score”.

[Dive deeper into each cluster] Instantly access the webinar →

2. Track PPC Terms For SEO Coverage

Make sure you track paid search terms in your SEO tools, methodology, or software.

When tracking, you’ll have to:

• Make an initial comparison to show significant gaps.
• Create a process to share PPC keywords/search terms.
• Set threshold for spend inclusion in SEO monitoring.

This is important because gaps in tracking PPC terms for organic coverage limit synergy opportunities.

3. Show Value Of SEO Coverage

When you want SEO teams to translate their wins into revenue or savings, looking at PPC data is a great way to show value.

• Combine SEO coverage with PPC/CPC to estimate paid traffic value.
• Show traffic and cost impact when building business cases for more resources.

This can help further justify investment in content and SEO focus areas.

[Discover how] Instantly access the webinar →

4. Understand SEO Coverage On PPC Categories

Use SEO data to help influence PPC budgeting decisions.

• Compare your SEO coverage against your PPC categories of spend.
• Identify the highest risk areas where you risk losing holistic search coverage.
• Position 1-3 & Page 1 coverage are most important in the decision.

[Learn how these reports can help you make tough decisions] Instantly access the webinar →

5. Understand Brand Cannibalization

Review your brand coverage overlap through both organic + paid via CTR%.

• Monitor impact through average CTR of brand terms.
• Estimate brand traffic by comparing gain/loss across channels.
• Determine brand coverage aggressiveness. Depending on the landscape: is it a competitor or a reseller?

This is how you put process, people, and technology into great use. Ensure people are aligned, track your progress, and watch how this synergy maximizes your team’s returns.

[Slides] Boost Organic & Paid Traffic: How To Bring Your SEO & SEM Teams Together

Here’s the presentation:

Image Credits

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal