PPC, Local & Organic – The Three Musketeers of Search Visibility

When promoting your business online what are you looking to do? Do you try to drive visibility in paid search, local or organic and hope to be found? Or, do you make it so it is impossible for users not to find you?

The latter obviously offers much more awareness and branding potential and if you are doing everything else right will generate a lot more interest (and ultimately business).

The Three Musketeers of Search Visibility

We are all too often guilty of reductionist marketing campaigns that look at one single element of search visibility and in doing so we miss out on opportunities. Visibility drives confidence and visibility across the paid, natural (organic) and local components of a search results page provide an opportunity.

Athos – PPC

PPC is your flexible friend. Get adverts running almost instantly above the standard search results. Target users by keyword, location, demographics on Google search and around the web. Also, follow your site visitors around the web with remarked adverts.

Aramis – SEO

Around 90% of search clicks go to the organic results so whilst PPC will get you up front and centre organic SEO will get you into the main arena. Organic results tend to lean towards informational results so this is where your content marketing strategy will become ever more important.

Porthos – Local SEO

Local SEO is the young trendy one of the gang and more and more commercial search queries now localise the results and where the search term has a local intent. This can take the form of standard looking results that have localised or truly local results with a pin showing the placement in Google maps. Then end result is that local businesses get a huge leg up in the search results with either local search engine users or in searches about a specific location.

d’Artagnan – Landing Pages

Although not one of the Three Musketeers conversion led landing pages should be at the heart of all of your inbound marketing efforts across PPC, Organic Search and Local Search. These pages should be built with a mind to take that search traffic and convert into either a soft lead (email newsletter / social media) or to generate a sales or service enquiry.

Putting it all together

The best way to illustrate this is with the results of one of our clients Fazeley Events. Fazeley Events work with us to help them generate visibility in search and our approach here incorporates visibility in paid search, organic search and localised search results.

In this case we can take keyword information from Google Adwords (PPC) to determine that by far our most important keyword is ‘wedding venues’. Notice there is no location keyed in there but rather just a search for that term. We do see searches as well for ‘wedding venues Birmingham’ and the results are much the same but the volume is a fraction of this one generalised term. Here PPC provides some visibility but also gives us insight into what to target across the organic and local vectors.

The term ‘wedding venue’ is a perfect example of a term that Google will localise and will detail a list of local businesses as well as the paid and organic results. These will be generally inserted in the other results and in the example below, we see that there are three paid listings, three organic listings and then seven local listings with several more organic listings below that.

In our example here Fazeley Events have three listings on this page a first place listing in the paid search results (see my red arrows), a third place listing in the local results and a 7th place listing in the organic results. One page of search results, three listings for the same wedding venue landing page – not too shabby.

Results page for ‘wedding venues’ search in Google.co.uk

What Next?

If you are looking to generate more business from search engine users be sure to take a look at the search landscape for the areas you target. Consider what the results look like and are there opportunities to be visible in the paid, organic and local results and if so then you can triple your exposure with a well structured campaign (and the best bit is that local bias is strong but sending those local signals to Google is not as complex or competitive as traditional organic SEO can be on a national level).

If you have any questions or would like to pick my brain on how to get your business visible across The Three Musketeers of Search then drop me a comment below, follow me on Twitter, Google+ or Facebook or drop me an email at [email protected].

PPC, Local & Organic – All for one and one for all!