SEO vs SEA : reconciliation around the same digital strategy

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stratégie digitale sea seo|Visibilité SEA SEO desktop|Visibilité SEA SEO mobile|Rich Answer SEO

SEA and SEO have long been considered two enemy brothers. Despite their very different visibility and functioning, these two Search techniques work for the same purpose: to develop a company’s digital acquisition strategy by attracting more traffic to its website. Today, the time for reconciliation between SEO and SEA has arrived. Find out how to build on their complementarity in your digital marketing strategy.

SEO-SEA : what visibility in SERPs?

What has long created tension between SEA and SEO is their divergent visibility in search engines. Profitability dictates that ads have priority space in the results pages and, as a result, a generally higher clickthrough rate.

Visibilité SEA SEO desktop
Example of the SEA and SEO visibility in the SERP desktop on the request “Summer dresses”

This dominance of SEA on the visibility of SEO is even more important for mobile searches. Several scrolls may be necessary before seeing the first natural results:

Visibilité SEA SEO mobile
Exemple de la visibilité SEA et SEO dans la SERP mobile sur la requête “Robes d’été”

On the other hand, the evolutions of recent years with the deployment of the “rich answer” blocks and the arrival of the voice search have made it possible to rebalance the balance a little more by offering a new window to natural results.

Rich Answer SEO
Sample Rich Answer & People blocks also ask in the SERPs

How to bet on SEA-SEO complementarity?

Getting the most out of your SEO strategy and SEA strategy is essential to get the most out of your SERP visibility. For that, several criteria of complementarity operate:

Searching for keywords

In SEO as in SEA, the heart of the strategy is based on the search intentions of users. Semantic analysis (or search for keywords) is therefore essential to both methods and can serve as a basis for reflection in complementarity. On the one hand, we can bid more on larger and more competitive keywords, on the other, we can naturally optimize its positioning on more precise keywords, long tail.

Even better, you can regularly adjust this keyword distribution by increasing bids on lower keywords in SEO or decreasing them for naturally powerful keywords. What to ensure maximum traffic for the same budget.

Content optimization

Content is one of the fundamental pillars of SEO. Optimizing the right keywords in the text of your web pages is a basic principle to position yourself in the first results of Google. But the semantic richness of your landing page will also improve their quality score at the campaign level by bringing much more relevance between their content and that of paid ads.

In addition, content created to boost your SEO strategy can serve as a basis for many promotional campaigns. For example, the realization of a whitepaper can attract traffic to an article and the website, but also to collect email addresses via advertising campaigns to download the PDF that can be reused later in other remarketing or e-mailing campaigns.

A powerful technique

A website that is technically efficient and facilitates the accessibility of your pages to search engine robots is beneficial from every point of view. In SEO, it ensures a good crawl of your pages and your content to index them better. In paid search, the technical quality of a web page has a positive influence on the quality score of the ads.

A clear URL structure

In order to be able to create effective remarketing lists for your advertising campaigns, a proper URL structure is required. Good thing: a good URL structure is also a significant advantage in SEO. This allows robots to better understand the hierarchy of the website and better categorize pages between them.

Short-term and long-term strategy

It is on this point that the SEO-SEA complementarity makes sense. Indeed, paid search can gain visibility instantly, according to the budget applied to campaigns. SEO, meanwhile, will take longer to produce its effects, but they will have an impact in the long run. The traffic generated by the first will cost you directly (and always) money while that generated by the second will be free.

The interest of thinking about your digital acquisition strategy by combining SEO and SEA is to push your new web content in a first time via advertising campaigns (short term). Once your content has gained traffic and popularity and performs naturally in search engine results, you’ll reduce your ad spend by taking advantage of good SEO positioning over the long term. This method of operation will allow you to better manage your ROI throughout your digital strategy.

Do you want more advice to carry out your digital strategy? Contact us. Our SEA and SEO experts will be happy to guide you.