The search marketing director at Acceleration dispels the myth that natural search is free and explains how to measure its value.
The biggest misconception that surrounds organic (or natural) search engine marketing (SEM) is that it is free. Although you don't pay per click, there is a real cost associated with building organic traffic, and you need to know what this cost is to measure the effect your SEM efforts are having on your marketing return on investment (ROI).
How much is this cost? According to SEMPO, search engine marketers spent $5.75 billion on SEM in 2005. Of this, 11 percent went to organic search, 83 percent to paid search, and six percent to paid inclusion and search engine marketing technologies.
Yet a 2005 study by iProspect shows that 45 percent of marketers either had not measured ROI or were unable to distinguish between ROI from paid and organic search.
Of even more concern is that one out of two people who outsourced their organic search to a search marketing agency did not measure the return or were unable to do so. If you cannot measure the return for the marketing dollars you spent on search, how will you know whether the investment is worth it?
The study was conducted a few months ago and things can change pretty quickly in the search marketing environment. However, I have seen a number of search agencies perpetuate the misconception that organic search is free. These agencies provide both paid search and natural search services and rightly leverage organic traffic to save dollars on paid keywords.
Any paid search marketing agency worthy of your marketing dollars will use experience from organic search to optimize paid, especially when it comes to keyword selection and visa versa. But these agencies mislead clients by focusing on the "free" traffic when clients have actually paid thousands of dollars for the learning that led to the delivery of traffic.
Just as there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is no such thing as free traffic. When running search campaigns, consider the following:
1) Paid search traffic and conversion reporting allow for every dollar to be accounted for and quantifying your return is less of a challenge. You are also able to determine which keywords are performing and can maximize efficiency and volume by shifting dollars accordingly. Paid search allows you to take “the mind of the searcher” into consideration, selecting your keywords, message and landing pages according to the keyword category.
Generic keywords could indicate that the searcher is in an information-gathering phase, where messages should contain product information and a hook and landing pages should be rich in information. Customer-orientated messages and brand-rich landing pages should be tied to brand-specific keywords. Paid search allows you to assign different ROI requirements to different keyword categories and consumer minds.
2) Organic search traffic and conversion reporting is fundamentally different to that of paid search. Organic search is slower to roll out and even though it is usually cheaper than paid search, it is more challenging to account for every dollar. Either you are outsourcing the work and can associate a direct cost to the campaign, or you have gone the in-house route and have operational costs that should be factored into your ROI reporting.
How much are you paying your in-house organic optimization team and are there any opportunity costs associated with their time? Without a good web analytics tool you will be unable to distinguish between paid and organic traffic and conversions, a requirement for optimizing and reporting on all search campaigns.
3) While you should probably be running paid and organic search campaigns you must separate paid and organic costs and traffic to determine the true ROI of each. Once you have done this, however, your job is not yet done. There is no doubt that paid and organic search campaigns impact each other. In some cases, running both types of campaigns may produce a result that is greater than the sum of their two parts.
In other cases, there may be a subsidy cost of running a paid campaign in conjunction with organic listings. You must understand the dynamics of your campaigns and the effects they have on each other. Comprehensive benchmarking using a sophisticated web analytics tool is the only way to properly understand this interplay, but I'll write more about this topic in future articles.
Measure all aspects of your SEM campaigns properly to understand their value. Not measuring organic traffic or being unable to distinguish between organic and paid costs does not make organic search free. Invest in a web analytics tool that enables you to make the distinction and ensure that your SEM partners report on organic and paid campaigns separately. Know which part of your SEM efforts is not performing and take good marketing decisions based on facts.
Wayne Lieb is the search marketing director at Acceleration. Read full bio.