How to maximize brand awareness through paid and organic search without increasing spend?

Learn 8 strategies to make the most of you spend and increase visibility.

Recent studies show 87% of shoppers in the U.S. begin product searches online. Additionally, 54% of consumers trust websites more that appear at the top of SERPs.

Translation: effective brand awareness turns a single Google search into a potential customer acquisition opportunity.

If you’re not showing up on Page 1 for critical keyword phrases from your target audience—via paid or organic search—then you are missing out big time. Find out how to leverage your paid and organic strategies to fuel brand awareness and expand online visibility with this article.

What you’ll get from the article:

• Examples of winning strategies from successful companies
• 8 tangible ways to maximize brand awareness through paid & organic search
• Guidance on how to measure results

When considering paid and organic marketing, it is essential to recognize the benefit of applying both tactics. Achieving a synergy between the two can maximize impact and grow the size of your audience, while also avoiding unnecessary expenditure in areas where your presence is already established. Determining the optimal balance is the key challenge.

The most effective digital marketing strategies typically involve a combination of paid and organic search approaches. Bidding on paid keywords can be a great way to boost visibility, while investing in organic content creation can be a more cost-effective option for keywords and phrases that are too costly to bid on through PPC. It is important to leverage insights from paid search to inform organic search efforts and vice versa in order to achieve the best results.

As we’ll discuss, sometimes it’s best to bid on paid keywords to improve visibility, while other times it’s more cost-effective to invest in organic content creation for keywords and phrases that are too expensive to bid on via PPC. A comprehensive strategy uses insights from paid search to inform organic search efforts and vice versa. In this section, we’ll provide concrete strategies to help you maximize and even surpass your brand awareness goals using paid and organic.

Here are eight concrete strategies to help you maximize—and even surpass—your brand awareness goals using paid and organic. Read on for a deeper dive on each strategy, along with tactical details on how to implement.

Start with solid SEO foundation

Establishing a solid SEO foundation is an essential part of increasing visibility on search engine platforms. Without this foundation, you would be solely dependent on paid advertising campaigns to make an impact.

There are several ways to measure the strength of your website’s technical and on-page SEO. First, how do you rank for branded terms? If a significant portion of your organic traffic comes from branded search terms, many users are already familiar with your brand and see your site on Page 1 when searching brand-related terms. You should check the types of branded terms you are showing up for. Are you mostly ranking for searches comparing your brand to others (Asana vs. Jira, for example), or are you ranking for keywords signaling purchase intent (i.e., asana user license)? Your strategy and preferred assets may differ for each of those branded searchers. You’ll want to ensure the right asset is ranking for each type of branded search.

Next up, you should analyze how you rank for non-branded keywords relevant to your category. This requires extensive keyword research, in which you bucket keywords into categories that are important to your brand. You’ll also want to bucket them into intent stages. After setting up this foundation, you can assess your organic performance at a glance using your preferred SEO solution. Non-branded keyword research will tell you the topics you are most and least visible for and inform your content strategy for organic and beyond.

Finally, technical SEO is an underestimated yet crucial part of your SEO performance. If SEO is like your house’s foundation, then technical SEO is the ground you build on. Without it, everything else will crumble. Google and other search engines need to index and understand the content on your site quickly. This means you have to use schema markup, hreflang tags, and site speed optimization to improve your site’s technical health and user experience. While technical SEO can feel daunting, there are real-time monitoring solutions that can help automate which issues to prioritize first based on the expected impact and ensure you make the necessary optimizations before rankings are impacted.

Once you have a strong SEO foundation, you can assess what’s working and what’s not. Notice competitive areas where you are underperforming? These could be good places to score a quick win by bidding with paid search. Similarly, you might be able to scale back on paid spend for areas with strong organic visibility.

Identifying areas for paid search where organic performance is lacking

Identifying areas of opportunity for paid search where organic performance is currently lacking can be beneficial to increase brand awareness. Utilizing PPC strategies can help to gain visibility for terms that are not yet ranking organically.

As mentioned above, PPC is a great way to generate brand awareness for terms you are not (yet) ranking for organically. Paid search allows you to target specific personas, taking user history into account when deciding whether to bid on a given term. In other words, you can use PPC to specifically reach people in the market for your product/service or those who have never interacted with your brand. This can be incredibly powerful when paired with strategic budget allocation in other areas.

The trick is to use the above SEO foundation to help maximize your paid budget. If you find you need to improve on branded search terms organically, or if the wrong page shows up, then you should consider bidding on paid keywords with the best-suited landing page. This ensures that you capture valuable branded traffic while you fix any issues that are preventing you from ranking via organic SEO.

You can also use PPC to bid on a competitor’s branded search terms that you will never show up for organically. This helps your brand to appear to someone searching for a competitor. Known as a conquest page, this strategy can work well but according to insights from our paid search intelligence partners at Adthena, costs can quickly exceed the return on investment with this strategy. Although bidding on competitor-branded terms is worth considering, it will likely not be the best strategy to prioritize unless brand awareness is a critical need and you have the budget to do so.

Testing brand-related keywords across both paid and organic search

Testing brand-related keywords in both paid and organic search can be beneficial. These keywords typically include the name of the product or service being offered. Paid search can provide insight into which keywords are successful in organic search, and the same can be said for organic search in relation to paid search.

Brand-related keywords directly contain the name(s) of your product or services. Paid search offers a valuable testing ground for organic brand-related keywords and vice versa. For instance, you may find that nobody is bidding on your brand name, making organic a better (and free) way to target those searchers.

Additionally, you can save on paid budget for terms by taking your competition’s strategy into account. Adthena’s new Brand Activator tool can automatically pause spend on keywords when you are the only paid ad and the top organic listing. After all, why bid on your branded terms when you’ll show up organically anyway? Just make sure you reactivate your spend if competitors step into the fray or if your organic ranking drops. *Bonus: Adthena’s tool does this automatically.

You can also use the same data to determine areas for additional content creation. If a brand-related term is expensive to acquire via PPC, you can work towards capturing that traffic organically by creating and optimizing value-driven content. While you’ll probably want to continue bidding on those terms so that you don’t lose any valuable traffic, organic traffic can be less expensive and higher converting than paid traffic for this use case.

Realign your paid and organic marketing teams

Maximizing your paid and organic search marketing budget requires the alignment of your paid and organic marketing teams. Keeping these teams in separate silos can lead to unnecessary duplication of efforts and an increase in budget.

Team alignment is key to maximizing your paid and organic search marketing budget. Siloed organic and PPC teams lead to duplicated efforts and inflated budgets. Here are a few ways to develop a synergistic relationship between your marketing teams:

• Establish regular check-ins between paid and organic teams. During these meetings, marketers can review past performance and align future initiatives.
• Designate a PPC liaison on the SEO team and an SEO liaison on the PPC team. These marketers can ensure alignment in the times between planned check-ins.
• Share insights gleaned from each team. Paid data is extremely valuable for organic optimization and vice versa. As we’ll discuss below, paid search reporting can help identify new long-tail keywords to target via SEO.

Breaking down these siloes helps ensure that you’re spending limited resources effectively.

Leverage a combination of paid and organic data

By combining organic and paid data, brands can develop a more comprehensive strategy to increase visibility across all relevant keywords. This article provides in-depth insights on when to use paid data, when to use organic data, and when to use both.

As mentioned above, there are numerous ways that paid data can help inform organic efforts and vice versa. Here are just a few ways to leverage the data that your teams are already capturing. The goal is to combine the two data sources to improve your brand’s visibility across your entire breadth of keywords.

• When to use paid data: PPC is a great place to test keywords you want to rank for organically. Develop content to target low-converting, high-cost paid keywords using SEO instead. You can also use paid data to learn what your competition is bidding on and then target those areas using PPC and/or SEO.
• When to use organic data: SEO data can inform you which paid keywords to target. If you are not ranking well organically for an important set of terms, it may take some time to build/optimize content that will rank better. Therefore, it can be a good idea to target those terms instead via PPC in the meantime. There also may be head terms that are just too competitive to rank for organically. PPC can be a great way to buy visibility and increase brand awareness for such searches.
• When to use both: Combine paid and organic data to unlock deeper insights about your performance and maximize your budget. You should use paid, along with the right SEO solution and talent, to get a full picture of your search performance. Are you bidding on paid keywords that you already rank well for organically? Consider pulling back on paid spend for those terms. Are you duplicating landing pages across both paid and organic? Take search intent into account and optimize for conversions.

The takeaway: both paid and organic search offer useful data that you should capture and synthesize to inform a holistic search strategy.

How to use paid and organic data to support each other

• When to use paid data
  • Testing keywords you want to rank for organically
  • Learn what your competition is bidding on
• When to use organic data
  • Discover what paid keywords to target
  • Target competitive head terms that are difficult to rank for
• When to use both
  • Combine data for a full picture of your search performance
  • Maximize budget by eliminating costs where you already appear organically

It is important to focus on Google, but wise to evaluate opportunities on other search engines too

When it comes to SEO, many brands prioritize Google given its global presence covering over 90% of searches worldwide. However, it is important to note that this varies significantly depending on the country. For example, the search market in China is dominated by Baidu. Additionally, within the U.S., engines like Bing account for nearly 1 billion daily searches. Therefore, while targeting Google is important, it is also beneficial to evaluate opportunities on other search engines.

For many brands, SEO is synonymous with Google. This makes sense, as Google accounts for over 90% of searches worldwide. However, this varies significantly by country. Baidu dominates the search market in China, for example. Even within the U.S., engines like Bing account for almost 1B daily searches. There are slight differences in indexing, reporting, and paid bidding depending on the search engine.

Paid and organic opportunities on other search engines can be both easier and more cost-effective than those on Google. This is why it’s important for all companies, not just those with an international presence, to consider investing in paid ads and organic ranking opportunities across multiple search engines.

Use PPC investments to target mobile users and organic content to target desktop users

Given Google’s recent shift to mobile-first indexing to emphasize the importance of mobile searches, the importance of mobile searches has become increasingly evident when compared to desktop searches, it is vital to understand the differences between desktop and mobile search results. This article will provide insight into why PPC investments should be used to target mobile users and organic content to target desktop users. Investing in PPC for mobile and SEO for desktop will ensure maximum visibility and success in the digital landscape.

Search results differ drastically between mobile and desktop. Google recently moved to mobile-first indexing, reflecting the importance and predominance of mobile compared to desktop. In general, you should consider targeting PPC for mobile searches and SEO for desktop ones (though, of course, this does not mean you should exclusively focus on one or another; finding the right balance is key).

Search intent can be very different for both desktop and mobile. Mobile searchers often have a localized intent, making mobile extremely important for retail brands with brick-and-mortar locations. Google functionality like local inventory ads and buy online/pick up in-store should be your focus for such transactional searches.

Mobile users are often less patient than desktop ones: they want to get the information they need and move on. They are less likely to make multiple searches. Not only that, but their screen size is much smaller, making them less likely to scroll down to see lower results. PPC can be an effective method to help your brand get seen at the top of mobile results. Just make sure your landing page is optimized for mobile conversions.

On the other hand, desktop searchers see more results on a single page thanks to larger display resolutions. Desktop users do not have to scroll as much to see organic results. As a result, they often have more patience and are willing to do multiple searches to find the answer they’re looking for. Helpful organic content will serve these researchers well and likely lead to increased brand awareness and conversions down the line. While it is not a hard-and-fast truth, targeting desktop searchers using organic and mobile searchers using paid is a good starting point.

Leverage organic content to maximize the impact of your paid campaigns

SEOs possess invaluable data that can be used to inform and optimize your paid strategy.

SEOs are sitting on a treasure trove of data that can provide insights for your paid strategy. Content and SEO teams should have a good understanding of their top-performing content. Are there trends in the types of content getting the most clicks and highest rankings? Which content assets are converting well, and which could improve? Are there areas where you own the first organic result but receive only a few clicks? These can all be indicators letting you know which content to feature in paid campaigns.

The point here is that you should also leverage high-performing organic assets for paid campaigns. This can supplement organic visibility for your most competitive search terms and categories. Just keep in mind that the landing pages for paid results will likely need to be different than those for organic ones.

How do I measure brand awareness strategies?

In order to ensure the effectiveness of the strategies discussed, it is essential to evaluate the results of their implementation. This involves selecting the appropriate metrics and regularly reporting on them in an efficient and scalable manner. Below are some of the most essential metrics for measuring brand awareness across different channels.

Channel-specific metrics to measure brand awareness: Where to start

• Branded search: Monthly change in # of users to pages from branded traffic
• Direct traffic: Monthly change in # of users
• Organic social: Impressions and # of followers
• Paid display ads: CTR

After selecting the desired metrics to measure brand awareness, actionable reporting methods should be developed. These can range from a straightforward monthly email sent to the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) to more complex automated reports generated by an enterprise SEO platform, depending on the size of the organization and the budget that is available.