SEM And Paid v Organic Traffic

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 5 of September , 2008 at 9:15 pm

I notice at time that website owners take on a paid search traffic campaign, often using the same keywords as their site. I can understand why since they have optimized those pages for organic search results. However, if you’re going to get heavily involved in search engine marketing, you need to be sure you have a good analytics package on hand.

Side by side testing can often reveal some rather startling results. I have at times noticed that conversion rates for the organic traffic converting at a similar rate to those from the paid listings. Why is this important? It depends on the amount of traffic received. If you are receiving more organic than paid traffic then I would highly recommend to look at alternative keywords in your search engine marketing campaign.

If your search engine marketing budget allows for it, then rather than losing the paid traffic for that keyword, look to expand and extra keywords. Looking at search statistics can give you an idea of what terms are being searched for. Add some of those terms to your paid keyword list and you should find your traffic growing, and with it your sales.

Whatever you do, if you are going to get involved in search engine marketing you are going to need some way of following exactly what is happening with that marketing. Don’t just look at your paid statistics; keep on any on the organic traffic as well.

                      Category: Search Marketing