Reasons Why SEO and SEM Teams Should Work Together

Keyword Expansion via SEO

A lot of SEO work results in traffic from the long-tail of searches. That is, a properly optimized site can bring in a lot of traffic in small amounts for a very, very large number of phrases. This list of long-tail words is an excellent source of ideas for what can be used with PPC campaigns. This can be particularly effective if a site is ranking well organically in one search engine, but not in another. When this situation occurs, the list of words from search engine A can be used for a PPC campaign on search engine B.

Long-Term Cost Savings from SEO

It's inevitable that every PPC campaign will contain high-traffic terms that cost a lot per click or high-conversion terms that don't quite offer the return necessary to justify their cost. With such words, SEO could be the answer to significant savings. For example, rather than spend $10,000 for 2 months for these high-cost terms consider instead turning off the campaign and pouring the $10,000 in to optimization efforts to attract the same traffic organically. Yes, deactivating the campaign for 2 months is going to result in short-term loss of revenue, but the results from the successful optimization effort will be many months or even years of "free" organic traffic.

Decrease in Per Click Costs

Recently Google made public some changes to their AdSense program. These changes include the addition of a quality score that is used when determining the cost of an ad. This quality score will mean that two exact ads will have different costs depending on the quality of the destination page. Although there are many factors that will be used to measure the quality of the destination page, most of these factors can be influenced by SEO. In fact, improving the quality of a web page as perceived by the search engines is pretty much what all SEO is about. So if you use SEO to increase the quality of your site, you will end up reducing the cost per click of your ads.