One purpose of search engine optimization–to get a high ranking in Google–gets so much play that it’s sometimes easy to forget an equally if not more important purpose: Making your website more useful and usable so that you can convert website visitors into customers. Not cyber-people but flesh-and-blood people who will actually walk through your door with real-live Amex cards in their wallets.
In a former position of mine, we were very successful at getting clients on page one of search engines in the natural results as well as the paid results (the ads you see in the right column of a Google search results page). However, there were some whose websites we couldn’t “optimize” for conversions simply because their templates and content was pretty fixed. In these cases, they could see that they were on page one or two of Google or Yahoo, and that they were getting online traffic as a result of this, but they weren’t seeing that that they were making any more money. Naturally, they didn’t want to continue to pay for a service that wasn’t proving its value.
“Companies spend immeasurable billions on their Web sites,” says David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer. “In most cases, without those central meeting grounds for companies and consumers, all the measured billions spent on online advertising such as paid search—which looks to drive traffic to company sites—would be for naught.”
On the flip side, you may have a website that is successful at converting visitors into buyers and is on the first page of Google. Why then, you might ask, would you invest in search engine advertising (pay-per-click tools like AdWords)? In large part because it’s been shown that you can double your traffic by running a paid campaign alongside top rankings on the organic side, according to a prominent search engine marketer who also says, “Being at the top of Google organic search is the top priority for just about every online marketing company that knows what that top placement would mean to a company. The difference between being at position#1 and #11, in many cases, means the difference between a profitable company and a company scraping by.”
On a related note, in their book, Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO, authors Cristian Darie and Jaimie Sirovich touched on what they call the “fusion of technology and marketing”: “Search engine marketing is a field where technology and marketing are both critical and interdependent, because small changes in the implementation of a web site can make you or break you in search engine rankings. Furthermore, the fusion of technology and marketing know-how can create web site features that attract more visitors.”
This is what I call the synergy of search engine advertising and search engine optimization. They are the yin and the yang operating on different forces through different means. One is immediate, one is patient and slow. Together, they bring harmony to the world–Ok, I’m going overboard here. But you get the idea.
