Brands cannot afford to silo their search functions in this day and age, literally. Having siloed paid and organic search teams is costly, inefficient and can potentially cause side effects of regularly screaming into a pillow. I said potentially, but no one is immune. The cure, I hear you ask? Well because you’re probably busy and Googled an answer to the question, I’ll share the answer: it’s communication. But stick around to find out how to apply this to your everyday search scenario.

The Evolving Search Landscape and Integration

Back in the day, organic and paid search functions were seen as separate entities that only engaged when something went wrong (a competitor taking more market share, traffic loss, your site being hacked, etc.). One had platform reps to go to for information, the other had Twitter and Reddit and sandboxes. The search landscape evolved, and very quickly they became two sides of the same coin and the benefits of one impacting the other and vice versa became clearer.

But now with the lines between social and search being blurred (a whole other kettle of fish) and the standard search results real estate flipping faster than burnt pancakes (looking at you, AI Overviews), the gist is that brands can’t afford to keep paid search and organic search in separate corners of their marketing strategy.

The Pitfalls of Keeping Paid and Organic Search Separate

By limiting paid and organic search functions you’ll be faced with:

  • Duplicated Efforts: Creating similar content for both paid and organic, wasting resources and time.
  • Missed Opportunities: Failing to leverage data from paid campaigns to inform organic strategy (and vice-versa).
  • Inconsistent Messaging: Presenting different brand voices or messaging across paid and organic channels.
  • Suboptimal Intent Targeting: Not optimising keywords and themes across both channels for maximum reach and impact.
  • Conflicting Performance Measurement: Challenges in attributing conversions to specific channels due to lack of integration.

The Benefits of a Unified Search Strategy

By uniting both sides of the search coin you will benefit from:

  • Enhanced Search Strategy: Leveraging paid search data (search queries, click-through rates) to inform organic keyword targeting and content creation.
  • Improved Content Performance: Creating high-quality content optimised for both organic ranking and paid campaign landing pages based on relevancy scores.
  • Expanded Reach: Using paid campaigns to drive traffic to high-performing organic content, increasing visibility and brand awareness.
  • More Effective Targeting: Combining audience data from paid campaigns with organic search analytics for more precise targeting.
  • Holistic Performance Measurement: Gaining a clearer understanding of overall search performance and ROI through integrated tracking and analytics.
  • Holistic Search Test Designs: Using data from one source (for example paid search RSAs) to influence a test design for the other (onsite metadata)
  • Fluid Search Planning: Integrating roadmaps for key events such as website migrations, product launches, or brand moments to ensure visibility in these key moments.
  • Reduced Wastage: A targeted strategy to keep investment in core themes and products high if organic performance for these is low.
  • Holistic Search Competition Analysis: Discovering not only who is visible for your targeted themes, terms and products but who finds it necessary to bid on them as well.

And this not just the case for traditional paid search and organic, both functions can unite for the likes of shopping as well through optimised product feeds, data swapping, competitor analysis, enhanced product descriptions. The key is to treat paid and organic search as complementary channels, leveraging data from each to optimise the other.

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Steps to Integrate Paid and Organic Search

Now that I’ve highlighted the benefits outweigh the costs, let’s talk about practical Steps to Integrate Paid and Organic Search. The first step is to write out all the internal factors that are considered obstacles to overcome, and stakeholders to persuade. This could be your in-house SEO team, your PPC agency, website owners, brand managers, CMO. Prioritise by your other internal factors (budget, time, willingness to collaborate) and speak to them separately (but Alex, you said no silos, I KNOW, hold on a minute) to share the direction you want performance to go in. Any agency that shows reluctance to work with another or your in-house teams is a red flag.

    • Bring Everyone Together: Probably the hardest step in terms of availability but it is key. Arrange for 50 minutes of everyone’s time to run through the next few points and get feedback.
    • Establish Shared Goals and KPIs: Define clear objectives for both paid and organic search and establish metrics for tracking progress. These should ladder up to wider business goals rather than channel specific.
    • Collaborative Workflow: Foster communication and collaboration between paid and organic search teams. Even if you’re using two different agencies for each of the functions, get them aligned to one collaborative way of working in terms of project management, communication sharing, and frequency of status updates.
    • Centralised Data Platform: Use a single platform to manage and analyse data from both paid and organic channels. This could be the run-of-the-mill analytics platform you’ve been using for a decade, or a new dashboard uniting different data sources into one clean view. Our Data & Analytics team is fluent in holistic search dashboards and aren’t afraid of data challenges.
    • Agree on next steps: The start date for integration, what each search team requires to function together, who will be leading the holistic search strategy, and most fun, suggestions for your first holistic search experiment.

Final Thoughts

If you knew all this, then congratulations, you are armed with the knowledge to streamline your holistic search functions to get the best of both worlds (Hannah Montana fans, unite!).

If you still need help convincing those team members, separate agencies, or your CMO, contact KINESSO UK&I and we can set up a meeting with one of our search strategy consultants to help you work through a plan that will bring results.

And finally, if you’re interested in understanding your search audiences beyond Google - covering Social, eComm platforms and any form of search that exists on the web - drop us a line to discuss how our insights methodology, Unified Search, can help put you ahead of the discoverability and visibility game.