Organic and Paid Search Synergies

What is Organic and Paid Search synergy?
How organic and paid can improve your overall digital performance?
This is the best investment you can make in improving your website relevance, user experience and website performance. Organic and Paid Search synergy strategy can have a huge impact on your overall digital performance with important impact on any channel you may have in the media mix.
organic and paid clicks

What is the difference between Paid and Organic Search?

A search starts with : A USER, A QUERY, A RESULTS PAGE.

Both Paid Search and Organic Search target the same audience (user) and keywords(queries) in the same environment (result page), which often results in search cannibalization.

So what is the difference from a user perspective? Not a big difference. The user searches for a query and receives a list of results to choose from. The user doesn't distinguish the difference between organic and paid search, he only wants to see a relevant response to its query, and most of the times he clicks on top results. Not all queries are clicked or even scrolled to the bottom of the first page of SERP (Search Engine Result Page). More than 90% of the results that are not listed in the first page do not even get an impression.
google search from a user perspective
From a brand perspective, they have different budgets, different teams and different strategies to cover both parts, Paid and Organic Search. This is why it is very important to know how to leverage SEO and PPC synergy to increase ROI. If your SEA and SEO teams are misaligned you might be losing visibility, clicks, users on site, transactions, revenue, leads or other type of conversions that you optimize for.
google search from a brand perspective
From Google’s perspective, they have to respond with a relevant result no matter if it is a Paid or Organic result. Of course, first you’ll see the Paid results, then the Organic ones. Google says search should “Deliver the most relevant and reliable information available” and “Present information in the most useful way”.

How do Paid and Organic Search work together?

These are two channels that respond to the same user interest at the same time. Each time a user searches, there is a sorting algorithm that decides which is number 1,2 and so on for the organic slots and for the paid slots in the Search Engine Results Page(SERP). 

If your goal is to maximize your visibility and presence you should claim as many slots as possible. But, if your strategy is to maximize your ROI you can consider reducing cannibalization effects and distributing budgets as efficiently as possible.

In any case, you should definitely align the language you use in Paid Search with the language you use in your landing pages, compare organic and paid landing pages performance and semantic.

You should also start defining your strategy after your business and marketing objectives are clear. With the end goal in mind it will be easier to understand how search can help you reach your goals, where you have potential, where your visibility is at the maximum potential and where you still have space to grow.
paid and organic synergy with climbinsearch
Why is Paid and Organic Search synergy important?
When you join organic and paid data together you start getting very interesting insights. SEA and SEO teams may not have time to join data and dig for insights, but they sure can benefit from ready to use visualizations and insights such as the ready to use dashboards in ClimbinSearch.

They can also use free tools such as Looker Studio to combine data, but that implies time and effort. It’s all about the time and resources the SEA-SEO teams have and their commitment to make the most out of the SEA & SEO budgets.
paid and organic queries
What is the key benefit of Paid Search over Organic Search?
You can activate Paid Search anytime and have immediate results if you allocate a budget. Paid Search is a paid channel and can be used very specifically with bidding strategies that optimize for conversions, target CPA, conversion value, target ROAS, clicks, target CPC or target impression share.

Organic Search relies on authority and relevance, it takes time to optimize a website to get rankings for competitive queries.  Organic Search is an earned channel.
cost and conversion paid search
What is the key benefit of Organic Search over Paid Search?
Organic Search is earned in time, it is the recognition of trust, authority and relevance and you can rely on constant traffic and results. It is a long term investment and it is worth it, unlike Paid Search where you have results as long as you have budgets to invest.
paid and organic queries

SEO and SEA, or SEA vs SEO

Both SEA and SEO are responsible to make the brand visibile in Google Search and make sure to answer queries and provide relevant answers for users when their intent is relevant for the business. Search is where users find answers and is the best channel to respond and listen to what users have to say, want to find, intent to do or buy.

This also applies for research purposes, better content, better communication strategy online and offline. Google Search exhaustive study specific for your brand's category reveals lots of interesting insights statistically relevant for the market about the consumers and their intents and interests.

People search all kind of things on Google, you can be aware or not.
paid and organic synergy with climbinsearch
The best choice is to understand the search universe and the queries, create ads for the most important queries, prioritizing the ones that bring ROI and develop original and useful content for the organic strategy.

You can enhance the visibility by taking over slots in paid and organic, by minimizing cannibalization between the two channels to maximize search visibility and bring incremental results.

You can also use paid search insights like conversion rate and ROI at a query level to make sure the organic strategy is on the right track, or organic insights to enrich your paid search campaigns.
What is the effect of Paid Search on Organic Search?
There may be many implications, but there is no direct relation between paid search campaigns and ranking.

Indirect, having paid search visibility and bringing people on your website, you may increase your brand awareness and people may start searching for your brand, or your products online. Also, knowing conversion rates and revenues at search query level can provide valuable insights in terms of what topics to prioritize in your SEO strategy.

On the other hand, having paid search on top of top organic rankings will decrease your organic CTR. The expected organic CTR will be higher, but you need to be aware that it won’t compensate for 2 slots in organic and paid. It may be a very good strategy for incremental growth to redirect the budgets from some of the top organic queries to other queries with similar paid search performance results. You can do this manually or try the automation for paid-organic cannibalization you find in ClimbinSearch.
organic ctr when you stop ads
What is the effect of Organic Search on Paid Search?
Usually the SEO team optimizes for technical health, on-page relevance and off-page authority. The technical optimizations for speed, mobile usability and other types of optimizations have a huge impact on all the channels performance in the mix. The on-page relevance has an impact on the user experience and the conversion rates for all the channels performance in the mix.

In terms of direct impact on Google Ads, SEO teams look at expected Landing Page experience and can improve the indicator significantly. This has a direct impact on the Quality Score and on the Paid Search efficiency.
paid and organic queries
Cannibalization Tests Results
For example, a client from the entertainment industry  saved 2,821.32 EUR and gained 1,044.59 EUR in 31 days, by running a manual cannibalization test on Google Ads. The total test value was 3,865.91 EUR.

They put 7 keywords on hold on Google Ads for France territory.
- 2,821.32 EUR was the Ads budget for the 7 keywords, which was redirected to other campaigns.
- 1,044.59 EUR was the Organic value associated to the 7 keywords which generated organic clicks only during the test period.

A manual test is easy to do and can give you an idea about what happens with paid - organic cannibalization.
cannibalization test manual
Want to discus the Google SEA - SEO synergy for your brand with us?
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Technology, team, strategy

Two channels with a unified approach, through synergy

4 Steps to Maximize Search ROI

Visibility across branded/non branded terms, visibility gaps between paid and organic, automatic categorization of user searches, category visibility across channels, define, map and monitor user searches on user decision journey and many more.
Learn More
1.

Setup and Initial
Pre-Audit

Consolidate paid and organic into a single data set / source of truth.
2.

Business Insights Enrichment

Fine tune categorization of user searches with training data or rules, define CDJ.
3.

Build tests for incremental growth

Automatically generate test ideas based on account performance.
4.

Monthly Measure & Learn

Ready to use reports to track search synergy progress and performance.

What Clients Say About Us

We love genuine feedback and going beyond just business.
What we loved in our first year of collaboration: reactivity, partnership, automation, always come with new ideas, super fast and talented, hybrid vision between business & technical, smile & good mood."
iProspect France
Capucine Even & Manal Ettoubaji
One Viz Team
"ClimbinSearch is one of the three pillars that differentiate us in the Romanian market. It helps us develop strategies, synergies and win digital media pitches. It also helps us build, measure and learn from synergy tests."
Digital Climbers
Loredana Neagu
Head of Paid Media
"We brought innovation in our search approach by bringing in ClimbinSearch. The tool allowed the team to come up with a different approach and gave us the possibility to discover the synergy between paid and organic."
Groupe Seb Romania
Laura Birzu
Digital Manager Romania

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