As in an old Indian tale, if you handle paid and natural search as pieces, you'll jeopardize the whole.

"The First approached the Elephant, and happening to fall against his broad and sturdy side, at once began to bawl: "God bless me! but the Elephant is very like a wall!"

That line is from John Godfrey Saxe's poem, "The Blindmen and The Elephant." For those unfamiliar with the rhyme, it is based on an ancient Indian tale. In short, it describes how six blind men -- not knowing what an elephant is -- each latch a hold of various parts of the animal, and then individually analogize the entirety of the elephant based upon the body part in hand. As a result, the elephant is variously described as being like a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan and a rope. And while each blind man is correct in a limited sense, ultimately they all fail to grasp what an elephant truly is.

In essence, what the men in Saxe's poem failed to realize is that sometimes "integration," the act of combining into an integral whole, is more of a realization that the integral whole already exists, and that the view we hold may simply need broadening.

The search animal
So what does this all have to do with search marketing?

Plenty.

For our purposes, let's say that the blind man holding the trunk symbolizes paid search advertising, while the blind man holding the tail represents natural search engine optimization. While each may have a good grip on the individual discipline at hand, all too often it comes at the expense of the whole, as the two are often treated as completely different animals rather than a single marketing entity. 

Although often treated as mutually exclusive, natural and paid search comprise the whole of search marketing, and are really quite similar. Namely, the two channels are both highly effective marketing tools, both are pull marketing rather than push marketing, both require an understanding of how your audience thinks and therefore how it searches, and both are concerned with relevancy. A true search marketer will capitalize on these similarities and take a holistic approach first, then focus on the different tactical considerations. 

A possible approach
First, build a keyword map. Start with your intended audience and define it. Now segment the audience in some fashion. There are many ways you can do this such as demographic, persona or buying cycle. Now assign keywords to segments. Keywords may fit in more than one segment, and your branded keywords may cut across all segments.

In retail, for example, paid programs often target searchers in a buy mode, but neglect upstream keywords that may have an influence on searchers moving toward the buy mode and perhaps into your conversion funnel. The keyword map gives a good visual of how your target audience segments, and how you can push them from a research or consideration mode to a conversion mode (whatever that may be for you). You can have any number of segments. That's up to you, with the help of your search marketing agency to define.

Second, make an initial determination of which keywords will be the target of your paid or natural campaigns. Broad keywords targeting buyers in a research mode or product comparison mode may be most cost effectively targeted through natural search. Once sufficient data is gathered, you'll need to revisit this decision. An upstream keyword that correlates strongly with eventual conversion may be more cost effectively targeted through paid search advertising.

Third, quantify. Keywords, indexed pages and creative all attempt to drive qualified traffic. It's easy to drive traffic, but you're only interested in qualified traffic. One way to determine the quality of your traffic is by noting the actions taken by visitors to your site. In other words, once your audience segment arrives on your page, do they take the path that indicates they are, in fact, the audience you intended?

Typically multivariate landing page testing can help provide some insight on this for paid search. Of the audience reached, how many moved off your landing page onto another page on your site? You should take a baseline measure of your landing page, then fine-tune the landing page and compare results, and then do the same with natural search. With any keyword from any audience segment, you should be doing the exact same measurement and testing for both paid and natural search.

View the whole elephant
While there are many ways to execute search marketing in an integrated fashion, remember that the mindset should be primary, and the tactics secondary. Don't make the same mistake as the men in Saxe's poem did: Take the time to gain an understanding of the entire "elephant" first. Broaden your thinking and avoid a myopic perspective, and instead think of search marketing as a whole.

To facilitate this, you want to partner with a search marketing agency that understands how to achieve results in both paid and natural search. And while each vendor's approach may be distinct, their ability to execute on it is fundamental to the success of your overall program. 

But don't settle for a claim of integration simply because the vendor offers both services. Determine if its people have an integrated view of a keyword set and if they know how to leverage the combination of paid and natural strategies and tactics to achieve your goals.

In short, you want a search marketing vendor, not a "we can do both paid and natural vendor." That way you can be sure you've got a good handle on the "elephant" as a whole. Otherwise, you could end up feeling your way around in the dark, and miss the bigger picture completely.

Charles Haggerty is senior director of operations at iProspect. Read full bio.