Let’s take a theoretical ecommerce company and look at the big picture of the relationship between your ORGANIC vs PAID search marketing.

Let’s see. If they are spending an average of $20,000 to $30,000 per day to buy clicks, we’re talking a big budget. ($25,000 per day x 30 days = $750,000) However, if you look at the number of clicks they are getting from ORGANIC it’s almost 4X bigger.

So even in your smaller business, are you looking at the big picture between Organic Search and Paid Search Marketing? Are you doing everything you can do optimize your site? A lot of factors have changed in recent Google algorithm updates. Meta tags are dead and frequently updated and shared content is king. We’re back to the earlier maxim, "Content is King."

And there are better ways to get your content in the stream these days. The old practice of keyword stuffing will actually get your pages penalized. But into the stream you must go if you want to see Organic Search results to stay competitive. Social sharing has become the new page-rank accelerator in Google. So if you’re content is brochureware, and no one is interested or sharing and linking to it, you’re going to have to pay more for your PPC and struggle to keep your organic pages performing well. And with the hummingbird update Google is trying to get even more smart about delivering high-value (re: shared and linked-to) content above all other "static" or less-frequently shared content.

So looking at this company above do we think they are spending even a fraction of their PPC budget on their SEO practice? Chances are this company has a high-functioning SEO department that is optimizing daily for socialization and rank. And today the connection between the paid marketing department, the social media department, PR, and editorial content, have to thrive together or suffer downward pressure in their respective silos.

Even in our world, do you match up your PPC results with your SEO competition? Are you aware of your competitors and what words they are buying and optimizing for? How do you stay abreast of all the changes at Google and other search engines to keep your SEO process up-to-date with best practices?

If you are spending any money on paid search marketing you should use your learnings and results to build better content and better pages. If your content is not being shared by others, you need to figure out why and what to do about it. Use a percentage of your paid marketing budget to build a competitive SEO practice to get better results in both worlds. You can start by learning all you can about what makes page rank, SERP position, and other search performance metrics go up and down. And most importantly by understanding which search terms are actually generating the leads, sales, or goals you have set for your company.

Here are my top two SEO (and search marketing) resources to help your continued growth and success. Both of these companies have paid plans, but you can get a ton of information by poking around in their free training and informational articles.

MOZ.com – has a ton a free information. They offer a paid service to help you learn about and improve your search engine performance. The Beginner’s Guide to SEO – Moz.com

Spyfu.com – check on your own performance and rank against competitors. Their numbers are pretty accurate. And the ability to look back at your competitors paid ads, and ppc spend is very informative. You need this information to make better decisions about how you spend and optimize your online marketing. (The theoretical company data was from Spyfu.)

@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)

permalink: https://uber.la/2014/04/search-clarity-seo-vs-ppc/ ‎

Check out the Digital Strategist’s Notebook page and these other posts about learning social media:

• Social Business Lead Generation in 75-seconds (VIDEO)
• Hunting the CFO Online with Social Marketing (infographic)
• What is Strategic Content in Social Media?
• The 10th Discipline of Social Media; Socializing Your Content Effectively 
• Introduction to Social Media Marketing in 90-seconds (VIDEO)

Let me help you jumpstart your online marketing:

• FluentSocial (Social Media Marketing)
• FluentSearch (SEO, Google Adwords)