SEO Battles : SEO vs AdWords

Quotes

• “At the end of the day, SEO vs. SEM is about prime real estate on the internet. Those top spots, the major search terms that matter to your business. There are a lot of factors involved when you consider the implications of, do you pay for ads or not or do you do SEO or not, or do you do both at the same time, on the same keywords or not.” -Lillian

• “There is a lot of nuance to mastering the combination of SEO vs. SEM. Lets talk at some of the dynamics of SEM, similar to paid social, you have to pay for your media, you have to pay for yourplacement in your bidding for a specific keyword to get your ad shown.” -Ben

• “But the difference between SEM and paid social is that in SEM, someone is in an active state of search. They are looking for a product, service, or education. With paid search, however, they are just passively browsing and they dont know what theyre looking for.” -Ben

• “Paying for keywords, or for ads is all about control. You control what your ads are, how much you spend per click, you control the message that is out there and then if you look at the flip side in organic, there is much less control. We do everything we can to optimize for certain keywords but in the end, were really in a grey zone.” -Lillian

• “So with direct response, and direct ROI the pressure is much higher to get a result from the spend.” -Lillian

• “When were talking about competitive keywords, we are talking about keywords where many different SEOs at different companies are working on the website, on the content to rank for the keywords that have been identified to be critical for the business and these are keywords that people generally manage in Google Ad spend and bidding on it at the same time.” -Lillian

• “If you are a brand new organization more than likely youre not at a point youre big enough to battle for those top placements for these really competitive keywords but for the broader keywords you might have more of a chance.” -Lillian

• “One of the conversations Ive had with Jordan (Koene) was where his advice is that when youre starting out you should use SEM to test what placements are effective to understand what keywords actually convert for you and then build your SEO strategies around that.” -Ben

• “Often SEM can serve as a testing ground to influence what your SEO strategy should be.” -Ben

• “We need to work together. We need to figure out which keywords work and what we should optimize for but a lot of times, these two teams have completely different plans. Im very passionate about this topic and I think these two worlds need to be aligned. It is not unachievable but it is a bit of a challenge.” -Lillian

• “I like that you like peace instead of war and I think if there is actually an SEO Battle, it is between the paid search and the organic team.” -Ben

• “I think that the devil is in the details. I think you have to test your way and evaluate each individual landing page. You can always turn your ads off and on and see what happens with the amount of traffic youre driving. I think a lot of us marketers think about both channels at a top-down view.” -Ben

• “Its a battle. Youre on the offense and defense. Your defense is advertising on your brand name because your competitors are bidding on it and they all show up. In the offense is in doing the same to them and so youre talking about war. If an advertiser decided to bid on your brand name, they just declared war on your company and you have a choice whether to engage or not.” -Lillian

• “If your competitors are bidding on your brand name, I do recommend bidding on your own brand name but this also needs to be looked at on a country by country basis.” -Lillian

• “At the end of the day when I think about SEO vs. SEM, its equivalent to eating your sugar vs. eating yourbroccoli. When youre doing any sort of performance marketing channel youre going to get quick, measurable result. With SEM specifically, youre getting somebody that is actively searching for brands, products, services, knowledge and youre able to interject yourself into that search, it has a branding component, and also hopefully a direct response component which is how most people evaluate the channel but you have to pay for your media.” -Lillian

• “With your SEO channel, youre going to get higher conversions by being in the organic placement, youre going to have lower variable costs but it does take time to cultivate that relationship.” -Ben