The industry continuously talks about how Paid and Organic Search work better when in market together.  It’s no secret, when you have 2 listings you own more real estate or “shelf space”, but what is the degree of this impact and is it significant enough to require investment in one, when you have a reasonable presence in the other?

Google published its own recent research and presented interesting results across a variety of large brands and industries, including the finding that when both are present on a results page:  conversions increase and revenue per visitor is higher.

Additionally, Paid Search is the guaranteed way for a brand to emerge (with a reasonably competitive rank) for generic searches when Organic Search typically cannot, due to lack of meaningful content.  Google’s research (found in Google AgencyLand) shows the importance of non-brand throughout the search process as a large part (~50%) of the research phase happens on non-brand terms throughout the search cycle.

Google’s claim that “more searches + more ads = more traffic”, sums it up.  

Mantra for the marketer: Own as much real estate to capture consumer interest across the funnel.  This is precisely what Razorfish saw in our own research.

Razorfish Paid and Organic Synergies Research

Razorfish wanted to prove the relationship of paid and organic search visits and their impact on client revenue as well as to explore additional attributes that contributed to this revenue.  To do this we built statistical models on a year’s worth of client data of a large retailer.

The goal:  to identify key factors that impacted Organic/Paid Search revenue and quantify the synergistic or cannibalistic (if any) impacts of Paid and Organic Search channels.  The results were clear: the chemistry between the two channels worked great together!  Here’s how:

Before a consumer clicks a Paid Search ad, the probability that the consumer already visited the site’s homepage through Organic Search is very high.  Our research showed at least half (53%) of conversions and revenue happening through Paid Search are preceded by Organic Search visits within the previous 7-days.

It gets even more interesting!  For Branded Keywords, Organic Search visits impacted the Paid Search visits by 81% indicating the cyclical switching between Paid and Organic listings. The Razorfish models show strong synergy between paid/organic links, especially for Branded keywords. Our hypothesis  ( that was supported by the data), indicated that visitors use Organic Search links to navigate easily to a site’s homepage for research, before converting through Paid Search ads.

In spite of this ‘friends with benefits’ relationship between paid and organic: why does the paid link get the edge? As consumers research across both non-brand and brand keywords, Promotional messaging on Paid Search ads trigger conversions by reducing research time-span. The paid link triggers the conversion and is just the better deal since it offers you more ‘benefits’.

Playing defense against your competition is important.

What else did we learn?  Organic Search links and Premium Paid Search ranking (top ranked ads above Organic listings – not right rail) drives greater coverage on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and prevents diversion of traffic to competitor sites.  So when someone asks “is it important to buy keywords if you already show up in Organic Search, even Position 1?”  The answer for the most part is YES!  Otherwise you set yourself up to lose that traffic and potential revenue to your competitors.  Our research quantified this impact: for every unit increase in Competitor coverage (a unit was defined as premium listing, vs. top 3 right rail, etc.) revenue declines by ~12%.  But more interestingly for every increase in Paid Search ranking (that resulted in a click), revenue increased 10%.  This tells us your revenue declines at a faster rate when your ranking slips.

This data tells us to protect our ranking, but it should be our standard practice to prevent competitors, negative ads or misleading messages from exploiting the SERP space for our brands.  It’s a crowded marketplace so advertisers must blend Art and Science when managing a Paid Search campaign to ensure our campaigns are successful in hitting our client’s goals (profit/sales/leads) with a mix of Awareness and strategic placements that keep the purchase funnel full and push competitors down.

In Summary:  Organic Search plays an important navigational role in the consumer behavioral patterns while Paid Search is known to close the deal to a conversion as promotional messaging trigger the close.  Again, just mere investment in Paid Search is not enough, but aggressive ranking in both channels is key to positive impact on client revenue.

Why Paid and Organic Work Well Together

• Consumers convert  after multiple types of searches and clicks, in their ‘research’ phase
• Organic Search ranks well for Brand terms(read:  mostly navigational), but Paid Search can fill the gap on Non-Brand coverage (read:  awareness, deal-breaker offers)
• Paid Search messaging can be managed, tested and optimized.  And promotional language helps to close the consumer to the desired action.
• You can ensure an optimal experience by driving consumers deep into a designated landing page that relates to the intent of the search query through Paid Search ads.
• The more coverage you have, the less room available for competitors to steal traffic and revenue
• 1+1 = >2 (Friends with benefits can end up having a family!)

This new Razorfish Search blog series, Digital Marketing News, will feature quick hits on recent changes, success stories, and other news in the field of digital marketing.

The first entry briefly explores Google+‘s impact on SEO, sourced from PCWorld.com. The immediate impact: Google Realtime Search has been missing in action since July 4, 2011. Follow the link below to continue reading!

“Google suspended its Realtime Search on July 4. The search feature, which displayed Twitter feeds in real time, was turned off by Google because its contract with Twitter had expired. It is clear however, that the contract was not renewed because Google plans on including their own Google+ live feed into their searches, rather than Twitter’s.”

Continued: Google Suspends Realtime Search | Found and captured by Joe DeVita in NYC.

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With the start of the New Year, many companies are planning their press release calendars for the year, making it the perfect time to plan SEO public relations optimizations as well (and avoid being on the 2011 version of PR lessons learned the hard way).

Optimizing press releases for SEO helps to extend the distribution of the release, increase the number of listings within search engines, and create link development opportunities that are beneficial to overall SEO for a brand.  An optimized press release has a better chance of showing up within the natural search results of search engines, news listings, and blog results.

The big question is:  How do you go about optimizing your press release for the added SEO benefits?

Here are our top 5 PR Optimization tips:

1. Keyword Research:  Determine which 1-3 keyword phrases you’d like the press release to appear for within search results.  Choose terms that are both relevant to your release and commonly used by your audience (tools like the Google AdWords keyword tool and Google Insights for Search can help estimate the popularity of your terms).
2. Optimize Your Tags:  Once you’ve determined which keyword phrases you’d like to appear for, incorporate those terms within the Title Tags, Meta Description Tags, Heading Tags, and Image ALT attributes of your press release.
3. Optimize Your Content:  Incorporate your targeted keywords within the body text of your press release.  Use your keyword phrases (and their variations) naturally, but aim to have them account for about 1-3% of the total words of your press release.
4. Link Your Site:  Link selected keyword phrases in your press release to relevant pages on your website.  The content of the links should match the content and metadata of the pages they point to whenever possible.  As your press release is picked up online, these links will be replicated on other websites, creating very valuable backlinks to your site that can improve your website’s organic search visibility for the linked phrases.
5. Social Media:  Social news, bookmarking, micro-blogging, and Wiki sites can provide additional channels to distribute the press release.  These sites can further the reach and expand the viewership of the press release, as well as create valuable back links for your site.

He’s got flowers, one tooth and what looks like a green roof.

Announcing: the Updated Google SEO Starter Guide!

Google recently updated its handy SEO Starter Guide, first published in 2008.  The refreshed guide is very similar to its predecessor but with some timely, new additions and a cute new mascot.  It’s easier to read, with more images, better explanations, an SEO glossary and a new section devoted to mobile search.

Who’s it for?  The guide offers something for most experience levels such as SEO beginners, webmasters, brand managers or anyone interested in Google and how it works.  You can download the PDF offered by Google here.

What got better?  Enhancements can be found throughout the document referring to new tools and code that have been accepted since the 2008 publication.  The additions include:

• The canonical tag
• Adding image XML sitemaps
• SEO for mobile phones

The Canonical Tag

The canonical tag was introduced in early 2009 to help alleviate duplicate content problems – a core issue for many sites when more than one URL on a single domain hosts the same content (or largely similar content) forcing a site to compete with itself.

Example: <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />

The use of a canonical tag is a hint to the search engines as to which URL should be returned in the organic search results and provide webmasters with more control over the URLs that are displayed.

XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps were still somewhat new in 2008, when the original Google SEO Starter Guide was published. Now they are an expected way of informing search engines which URLs to index and recently are able to inform search engines of vertical search assets such as images and videos.

SEO for Mobile Phones

The SEO for Mobile Phones section is particularly helpful for anyone with a mobile site or considering the addition of one. Often, when mobile sites are created, they fail to redirect mobile users or search engines to the mobile-specific site. The guide offers good information on submitting a mobile site to Google as well as best practices for directing mobile users (and mobile search engine bots) to the right content.

Google finally launched its Caffeine update. For those unfamiliar with updates in the SEO world: Google traditionally launches a major change every two years, with a name seemingly chosen at some late-night Google engineers’ meeting.  These updates typically strike fear into the hearts of SEO engineers because they might shift the focus of the algorithm, resulting in major losses in rankings for sites that aren’t prepared.  Here’s a basic explanation of what happened with Caffeine:

The first and most important thing to remember is Caffeine is not an algorithm update, so rankings will not be directly affected by this change. Rather, it changes (1) the speed at which Google can crawl and index information to make it available to users in search results and (2) the amount of data Google can store in its index at once.

Prior to Caffeine, the Google crawling process would go as follows:

1. Googlebot crawled a site and pulled all crawled information into the Google index.
2. The newly indexed information was processed through the algorithm to determine the rank of pages for particular keywords.
3. Once this data was processed, the updated index was pushed out to hundreds of data centers in batches — a process that took over three months.

The data center you hit when you enter a search into Google is dependent on where you sit in the world and the load that a data center is currently experiencing. That’s why it’s said that SEO recommendations take up to three months to show results.

With the Caffeine update, Google is able to process indexed information through the algorithm and push it out to all data centers almost instantly.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that pages are being crawled more quickly — just that Google is able to get webpage updates out to all data centers more quickly.

The second focus of Caffeine is on storage capabilities. User-generated content has skyrocketed over the past two years, which became a problem for Google since there was so much more info to crawl and index. The update has increased storage capabilities so Google can index more information. Information can be as basic as a new web page or attribution to a page of credit for incoming links. The attribution model for links hasn’t changed. Google is just able to store more information for a longer time now.

Since this isn’t an algorithm update and there isn’t a ranking benefit, there is nothing in your optimization efforts that needs to change. The benefit to Razorfish clients is that updates will be processed almost instantaneously, so results of optimizations should show more quickly than before. Improved storage capabilities also increases the value of smart optimizations, as it gives Google a better view of interconnections among linked sites.