The Google Timeline: How SEO & SEM Strategies Worked Hand in Hand (A Retrospective)

What impact have Google’s algorithm changes had on SEO and SEM strategies? This timeline delves into the major updates and their effects on search engine marketing techniques.

Since the year 2000, search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) have coexisted in the same realm. Numerous advertisement formats and diverse result types have been integrated into the search engine results page (SERP), shaping a visually appealing and competitive environment.

Within an integrated setting, SEM and SEO teams can collaborate, share insights, and deliver incremental advantages, such as:

1. Keeping each other updated on rapidly evolving business strategies and swiftly adapting.
2. Ensuring uniform messaging on the SERP, contributing to a smooth user journey for clients.
3. Identifying patterns, irregularities, and prospects that might be challenging for a single-team channel to uncover independently. By having a larger team consistently working on a website, the collective intelligence of the business expands, providing better clarity in understanding requisites and predicting business demands.

Integrated teams can utilize diverse expertise to enhance other channels they collaborate with. Specifically, teams can jointly contribute to projects concerning messaging, on-page content / searcher intent, user experience, and optimizing SEO and SEM channels from a technical stance.

Content & Messaging: Employ Comprehensive Team Perceptions to Comprehend & Enhance Search Intent

Search intent commonly falls into two categories. The primary category is transactional, indicating searchers seek to make a purchase. The secondary category is informational, implying searchers aim to acquire knowledge. Both scenarios produce distinct outcomes, requiring each team to adapt its content and messaging approach to meet user requirements and make optimal use of SERP elements.

Transactional Searcher Intent

A search query like “navy blue dresses for wedding” showcases a transactional SERP, marked by paid and organic listings closely aligned with the search query. This includes advertising formats leading to product detail pages, such as product listing ads (PLAs), and organic links directing to category pages exhibiting products. The SERP often encompasses organic rich results like images or Google’s 3-Pack localized outcomes.

Strategies for Transactional Queries & SEO:

An effective SEO strategy for transactional queries heavily depends on utilizing rich SERP features and focusing on the following guidelines:

• Create a user-friendly site with an easily navigable and intuitive taxonomy, alongside robust internal linking signals.
• Include category or product listing pages providing a seamless user journey, comprising targeted meta data, an array of product listings, and compelling on-page content.
• Ensure product detail pages contain comprehensive product descriptions, images with optimized alt text and file names, error-free structured data, and relevant product attributes listed.
• Capitalize on rich result prospects by confirming completeness of Google My Business listings, enriching video listings with detailed transcripts and video descriptions, etc.

Strategies for Transactional Queries & SEM:

Most retail SEM initiatives heavily prioritize advertising support for transactional queries due to their typically superior return on investment (ROI). Apart from keyword/target bid, search engines evaluate an ad’s quality score to determine its ranking. Quality score involves:

• Expected click-through rate (CTR)
• Ad relevance to the query
• Landing page experience

Engines anticipate users to willingly click on ads and have a positive interaction. A higher landing page experience for advertisers (i.e., relevancy for the searcher and query) translates to an elevated quality score for the ad, leading to cost-per-click (CPC) savings compared to competitors. In SEO, ranking relevance hinges on providing a beneficial on-site experience that is directly pertinent to the original query. Similarly, regular monitoring of search queries and adding negative queries are crucial in SEM. These actions prevent irrelevant traffic from matching against advertisements, boosting the conversion rate of traffic reaching the site and aiding in securing higher rankings in auctions through increased quality scores — all while avoiding bid escalation.

Comprehensive Search Approach for Targeting Transactional Queries

Given the escalating competitiveness in the search domain, utilizing organic and paid placements enhances visibility and creates more interaction chances for users with your site. Integrated teams must strike the right balance between the required ROI to attain these SERP positions and identifying avenues that align with the brand’s objectives. Shared query assessments and an overarching holistic search ROI can be compiled and evaluated across teams to pinpoint additional opportunities within either channel.

Informational Searcher Intent

Informational search queries aim to provide answers to explicit or implied questions raised by searchers. SERPs for these queries usually feature prominent rich results containing quick answers or video content, news carousels, People Also Ask listings, and organic links. Some informational query SERPs may include paid listings. The example below for the query “how to tie a scarf” illustrates several such SERP elements:

Strategies for Informational Queries & SEO:

Informational queries present an opportunity for SEO to drive non-branded traffic, boost visibility, and establish authority. Depending on the industry, content addressing informational queries can serve as a vital supplement to a business’s offerings or may constitute the primary product. Retailers often utilize extensive writing, multimedia resources, and interactive elements to enhance a customer’s purchasing journey and differentiate themselves from competitor pages online. News portals, nonprofit organizations, financial service providers, and educational websites heavily rely on content that can address user queries, ensuring relevance and fostering engagement.

Similar to transactional queries, a robust SEO strategy for informational queries centers on targeting rich SERP features. To secure these placements, SEOs should consider implementing the following strategies:

• Conduct thorough keyword analysis and landscape research to grasp fundamental user questions.
• Evaluate a site’s existing content to determine pages needing optimization to address informational queries and identify gaps necessitating new content creation.
• Structure content aligning with the targeted SERP feature.
• Deploy structured data to facilitate search engine digestion of content.
• Employ image and video content to enhance user experience and adhere to SEO best practices.

InformationalSearch Queries & SEM Tactics:

SEM strategies have significantly developed through the years. Previously, the focus was solely on targeting keywords with the highest last-click return on investment. However, now the emphasis is on recognizing the importance of appearing in less conversion-driven search queries to engage potential customers earlier in the buying process. With various attribution models available today, there is more room to assign credit for conversions to informational queries. To achieve this, we propose utilizing one of the following attribution models:

• Data-driven attribution
• Time decay
• Linear

For these types of queries, it is most effective to direct traffic towards comprehensive content, such as blog posts, developed by SEO teams. Within SEM, acquiring this traffic is best done through running text ads that target specific queries matching chosen landing pages or using Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) to target relevant queries leading to designated landing pages. To decide the ideal ad format for this traffic, it is important to align on the goals set for this traffic and the volume of traffic driven by these queries. For clients beginning advertising on informational queries, we suggest starting with DSA targeting on a modest budget and utilizing an automated bid strategy aimed at increasing traffic. Subsequently, one can progress to create more tailored DSA targets or individual text ads for high-traffic queries, while also experimenting with more conversion-oriented bid approaches.

Comprehensive Search Approach for Targeting Informational Queries

For many brands, justifying the SEM expenditure on informational queries can be challenging as it tends to be a higher level strategy or branding initiative. However, by leveraging SEM insights, SEO can utilize paid data to identify areas where there is potential for better return on investment through informational content. This mutually beneficial approach enables the brand to justify the costs associated with content creation more effectively.

Case Studies: Technical SEO + Technical SEM

Natural Merchant Center Programs

Managing feeds is a specialized area where many SEM teams provide assistance, especially considering that 89 percent of non-branded Google paid search clicks now originate from feed-driven Shopping ads (source: Merkle Q1 2020 Digital Marketing Report). Until recently, SEO efforts did not prioritize this aspect as much, as most work was directed towards crawling, indexing, and ranking. With Google’s introduction of Unpaid Shopping Listings under the shopping tab, both teams have the opportunity to collaborate by:

• Ensuring the product feed complies with Google Merchant Center standards.
• Developing reporting dashboards for Organic Shopping Listings encompassing sessions, revenue, and other pertinent organic metrics.
• Collaboratively optimizing the feed by making title updates, testing images, tweaking descriptions, and enhancing Google product categorization.

Crawling and Navigation

From an SEO perspective, crawling and navigation play a vital role in influencing page discovery for search engine crawlers. On the other hand, SEM results are influenced by bids as well as the relevance and expected click-through rate of a product or group of products in the context of the user’s query and the search engine’s understanding of the user and their online behavior.

By leveraging SEM data alongside SEO data, we can identify orphaned Product Display Pages (PDPs) and categories that might be challenging to locate. An analysis of sales overperformance in SEM can help quickly identify these, allowing for optimization to potentially improve performance on-site and in organic search.

SEM, SEO, and Enhancing User Experience

When faced with similar bids, the SEM team can determine which individual products stand out on the search engine results page (SERP) and are likely to attract traffic, leading to conversions. Product traffic and sales trends, being components of a pull marketing channel, usually reflect seasonal demands across the entire product range. By leveraging SEM data, we can examine product-specific reports to identify top-selling products through SEM compared to non-SEM all-site sales. Focusing on these top-performing products can offer valuable insights into broader questions like “Which products should be prioritized to feature prominently on a category page?” or “Which products have potential to gain better visibility?” or “Which products should be discounted, considering they fail to convert effectively despite high relevant traffic?” Utilizing SEM product performance can assist in making informed decisions regarding what appeals most to the business’s customer base across different channels.

From a holistic business standpoint, both SEM and SEO teams are frequently asked how they can better support particular pages. For SEM, these pages might have low traffic volume or may not perform well even with paid advertising support. In the context of SEO, these could be pages that are well-optimized but struggle to rank in competitive search engine result pages. This presents an opportunity for both teams to adopt a customer-centric approach and jointly assess how users would prefer to discover and interact with these pages in their shopping journey. Implementing simple strategies like highlighting a page in the navigation menu, incorporating it in relevant product pages, and showcasing it in the site’s header and footer content can enhance user experience and brand visibility, irrespective of how a visitor arrives on the page.

Leveraging SEO & SEM for an Integrated User Experience

Operating solely within the confines of an SEO or SEM workspace may feel comfortable for individuals unfamiliar with integrated search practices. However, venturing beyond established routines to explore cross-channel techniques requires effective communication as the foundational step towards building a collaborative strategy.

To ensure a seamless experience for consumers, irrespective of their interaction with the brand, SEM and SEO teams should convene regularly to discuss ongoing projects and channel objectives. This collaborative approach will lead to innovative partnerships and enable search teams to understand each other’s perspectives better, identifying scenarios where one team’s insights could bring added value to business partners.

For individuals working within distinct SEM or SEO teams, cultivating curiosity about other channels can still yield benefits. While there may be limitations in implementing some techniques due to team structure, instilling a practice of posing user-centric questions to evaluate the holistic search journey will empower individuals to identify opportunities across all channels more effectively.