Search Marketing is a fast-growing industry. Businesses are quickly recognizing the importance of ‘being seen’ in online search results. One of the greatest benefits of search engine marketing is the fact that you advertise to a targeted audience – users who have already shown some interest in your product/service.

The anatomy of a search engine result page (SERP) is simple enough – it contains organic and paid listings. The ranking of these listings depend on many factors, but relevancy is one of the most important factors. Based on a search engine algorithm, the SERP displays search results and paid ads that are relevant to the search query entered by a user.

But where should we, as marketers, invest more money? Should we spend more time optimizing our website or optimizing our paid ads? This is a common question that puzzles most clients/marketers. I believe the two go hand-in-hand and should form part of your overall internet marketing strategy. Though the process behind them is different, both help achieve the goal of improving visibility of your business online.

SEO is a long process that needs time to produce optimum results. You cannot rank #1 for your top keyword in a day. In contrast, paid ads are easy to set up and give instant results. So, why not use insights gained from these paid ads to shape your SEO strategy? Paid ads are great for testing. You can test different headlines, calls-to-action, landing pages, and products, and use these results in designing your page content, headlines, and titles.

Apart from testing, SEO and PPC collectively is great for building credibility of your business. The presence of both adds to an element of trust. A user who sees your organic listing and your paid ad beside it is more likely to interact with your business. This follows the simple rule that the more space you occupy, the less choice users will have to interact with your competition.

Finally, it is difficult for a website to organically rank well for certain keywords. This could be because of aggressive competition or, maybe simply because there isn’t much content around that keyword on the site. In these cases, paid advertising can help. By including such keywords in your paid campaign, you can at least gain some presence on the search engines.

Search engine marketing is a competitive industry. Marketers should make every effort to occupy as much space as possible. Paid ads provide us with a great opportunity to improve visibility and grab more shelf space. Why not take advantage of this opportunity? What do you feel about integrating your paid advertising and SEO efforts?