SEM growth hack #4: Grow ROI with cross-channel optimization

Author: Lori Weiman / Source: Marketing Land

This article addresses the importance of optimizing your SEM (search engine marketing), SEO (search engine optimization) and PLA (product listing ads) channels together to gain monster ROI growth in the search channel.

Optimization of search advertising often occurs in a vacuum where SEM, SEO and PLA efforts are optimized separately. By optimizing these channels together, you can save money on unneeded ad spend while boosting your page visibility in the right places to generate more sales or leads — pushing you into monster growth territory!

Why cross-channel optimization matters

Search engine results pages (SERPs) feature different sections where different types of results appear. These sections include, but are not limited to, organic listings, text ads, product listing ads, local results, image results, news results and more. In implementing a holistic, cross-channel strategy, which takes into account site visibility across these different sections, we can direct our search marketing efforts to the channel where they will have the biggest impact on a keyword-by-keyword basis.

There are measurable benefits to optimizing SEM, SEO and PLA channels together:

1. Weak SEO. If you are weak in organic rank, you can quickly gain top-of-page visibility by boosting paid efforts in either SEM or PLA (as relevant for the keyword at hand).
2. Save money on SEM. If you are strong in organic rank, you could save some money on SEM by lowering to position 3 or 4.
3. Drive efforts based on SERP layout rather than channel. Manage the media channel that commands the top spot in the SERP (search engine results page) layout for each keyword. For example,…

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