005. SEO vs Paid Search

Hello everybody, my name is Emilio Garcia from Boundify. Welcome to our next episode of Boundify Live. Today we have great agenda prepared for you guys today. I have three topics to discuss and hopefully time will be enough to discuss all of them. If for whatever reason we can, then I would just cover one or two and leave the other ones for the next session. So I'll start right away. The first one is going to be about SEO and paid search. What's the difference between these two concepts? And I will not say what are the pros and cons, it's just how you approach them because it's completely different. We had a conversation a few episodes ago about the difference between in general paid search and paid social. Right? The difference between paying search engines for traffic and paying social media platforms for traffic. But this conversation will be slightly different. We're going to compare paid, but it's going to be paid search against the traffic that you get for free organically through the search engines. So as always, I will start with a few examples. I think that's, that's quite the right way to start. So we can see the difference right on the screen. I'm sharing my screen right now and I will start with something simple. Imagine that we are a good concept to compare here is inbound marketing, the concept of inbound marketing. So for those of you that are watching this, the ones that are listening, I will try to be as descriptive. But for those of you that are watching here, you can see that we do a search like this one and let me put something, something inbound marketing strategy. Let's see if I get some ads. Yes. So you can see I do the search inbound marketing strategy on Google and I'll get these results and the difference between traffic that is going to be, they're going to come through paid search for these advertisers. And the one that will come organically is that you can see these three first results have the word ad on top of them. They look quite similar to the organic results to be honest. Nowadays the only difference is probably the word ad. And in some cases you will notice that they have different configuration. For example, in this one we have something similar to a description that to the meta description that you will have on the website. There's also some specific links that have been added specifically by the advertiser. In this case by the company that is advertising. In this case it's LinkedIn is promoting their marketing products and the ones are here. The other thing that you can notice on this other ad is the phone number and the ones here have earned their place for this particular query on the top of the search engines. And of course there's not only two or three results you can see if I scroll down here, there are different kind of website mentions here and there are related searches. And finally you see that you can continue to see more and more results on more and more pages. And and usually for every given keyword or query, in this case you have not only hundreds of or hundreds of thousands, you have maybe millions of results available for you. So it's a mind blowing amount of results that you can get. So that will be the biggest difference from the user. But how you get the result either to organic or to paid, very incredibly, it's quite a difference on the backend to say the least. So how do you get those results through organic? Well, in this case because you are not really paying, it's up to Google to index your results. And I'm not going to dive deeply into how exactly SEO works. There are way more people that were more knowledgeable into that. But I will give you the overall idea is Google is in the search of all the time indexing pages to show results to users. And it uses signals to decide which pages should be on the first place or will have the highest priority that better respond or better answer the search that the user is doing. Use a combination of signals and there are many, there are probably thousands if not hundreds of thousands of signals. One of the few that are very known are related to the keyword being mentioned on the content, of course, on the headlines, on the descriptions. And the one that is very popular also is the linking between websites. So references of the content in other websites are add value to that or authority to that domain and to that page. There are many, many different criteria that Google uses. But what matters to know is that even if you know all the signals or a few of them, it's still up to Google to decide if you're going to show up on the first on the results and in what order. It's not up to you to decide exactly what is going to be shown. And this is very important, for example in the fact that yes, for example, if the headline of your website have a specific words they will show up here. But for example you can have a specific description on your website on the meta description. And still Google might take something a different part of your website to answer. Sometimes it will take your content and it will frame it in a different way like this one. The answer snippet that people ask you can see here that it's taking content to answer a specific question, which is what is inbound marketing? And he's using that content created by another company to answer that question. Sometimes it takes elements in the form of images and obviously video. So the work is done by Google and while you can influence it, you cannot determine it 100%. Another good example of how SEO is not or indexing content on the search engine is not in your control totally is. You can create a piece of content for a company that is based in the United States. And even when it's intended probably for the US audience, it will show up if in other English speaking countries there's not enough information or a page there answered the question in the US it will show up in other countries. It will show up actually in other countries if the search is done in English, for example, or if there's not really any good answer on the native language of that country. So you don't really have control of over what places of the world that answers show up. And the same happens on regions. When someone says, am I showing up in the first place on the Google search, that's something that is not stable across the board anymore. Nowadays what one person see for a specific query might be completely different from what another person see for another kind of query. Right? I was watching this, very interesting. It was an episode or like not a movie, but a documentary about social media and search engines. And they were saying that the same exact keyword or query done by different people, depending where they are, even their beliefs, changes the results because Google is trying to show something that is quite relevant to the person doing the search. So you, as a person that is creating content, have some control or not control, but you can influence the results, but you don't really have a say on how Google index it because in this case it's free. It's just indexing the content. And that's what the craft of SEO is all about, is understanding or trying to better understand what kind of content will perform better for certain kind of queries, trying to understand to the better possible way what signals Google is using. So that's SEO. Now, when you use pay search, the way that you show up is completely different because in this case you are paying Google for the benefit or the privilege of showing up in the first places instead of doing the work through content and waiting for them to index your content for free. Right? So that's the biggest difference is that you are paying Google and therefore you have a little more and more say on how you show up and it start with the keywords that you want to show up. That will be the first biggest difference. When you are paying Google, you pick the keywords they want to show up. So you can be very selective or very broad. For example, you can say something like, I want to show up for any query that has the words inbound marketing strategy, right? So if someone is typing just inbound marketing, I don't want to show up. Or if someone is typing marketing strategy, I don't want to show up. I want to. I need those three words to be part of the phrase in order for me to be willing to pay for an ad showing in front of users. You can be even more restrict and say something like the word has to be in a specific order or they just have to have these three elements. And that's important because I remember using another example the other session. If I go for app development, I might decide that I want to show up for app development or I just want to show up for app development company, which probably will have a little bit more of intent than just app development. I might decide that I don't want to show up for app developer salary because the intent of that query is someone looking for a job. And maybe what I'm trying to do is, is to offer my services as an app developer to a business owner. So if you create content, for example, for app developer through SEO, you might show up for app developer salary for whatever reason. Your content mentioned salaries and jobs and all that, but you don't have that much of a say on paid search. You have a little more control. Or the thing that is different when you are doing paid search and is that you have control over the geographical areas, right? As I was saying, when you are showing up for Google for a specific piece of content, once you create it, you will show up for whatever Google thinks is worth putting the content. But if you pay, you can select specific areas, you can select a country, you can select state, you can select a city, even a zip code. So you can be very narrow, very specific on your selection of the area or the geographical area where you will show up. Other things that are different are obviously the content that you select here, because in this case the headline, the description, the URL, they will be the copy of your ad, right? And what I mean by copy is the words that you will use and how they will be presented. So you will have control over what show up, right? You pick the headline, which when you are doing organic content, you can also have influence that very heavily or heavily. But you will have more control over the description, over links, putting a phone number, putting your location, that kind of stuff. Finally, another aspect that you can control over paid search is some demographic information, like for example, age brackets, you want to show up for a specific age brackets or specific genders, or you want to show up for specific income brackets. You can also make those selections, something that when you do in SEO, you can't. So this will be the largest difference. Now you might ask, well, so that means that paid is better than organic. No, no, by no means. There are just different ways of getting traction and they have benefits and obviously some issues in the long term. One of the largest problems, or not problems with issues or challenges with paid is, is that it's a competition, it's an auction. So if there's a lot of people interest on those terms, then they're going to bid for those terms and you will have to pay more money to be able to show up in the first places. And usually, obviously, because the terms are well known and all that, the competition drives the prices high enough that there's little opportunity to have an exponential effect saying, well, if I spend $1, I'm going to get 3, 4, 5, 10 times what I am spending. The chances of that have been lowering over time because more and more people is using the platform for advertising purposes and they're just driving the cost up. So it's a platform when you're using paid, where it's very hard to scale, where if you want X amount of traffic, you have to pay X amount of dollars. And, and if you want to increase that traffic, you just have to double the number to maybe get double the traffic. And at some point the returns start to diminish because you saturate the available searchers that you can pay for. And obviously if you want to get more and more traffic, you have to outbid or win the auctions against your competition, which means you will have to put more money on the table to compete. So one of the largest challenges of paid is that it's not a very scalable channel. Something that on organic, if you can do it, it's a very good thing. You can create content on a consistent way and it will take a long time. That's one of the issues with organic traffic. It will take a long time, but once you start getting traction, you keep your own pace creating content on a consistent basis and the results will compound exponentially. At the beginning, they will start very slow, but as times go by, your traffic will increase exponentially. And that's a place where you can scale, right? You can scale over time, where you can compound the efforts just like we have an investment, which pretty much is the way that you can see it again, going into the pros and cons or when it makes sense to use one and another. One great thing about for example pay search is that you can use it to test ideas, to test the market. For example, imagine that you have a company and you want to enter in the US and you want to enter Canada. So if you are going to have a presence through organic, you really have to have those local signals because Google knows very well what domains and what conversations are related to Canada and which ones are related to the U.S. even when the language is the same with variations obviously in pronunciation, all that. So if you wanted to do through content, you will probably have to have a specific presence, something under a sub domain for Canada or, or something similar. And it will take time for you to build that presence. And obviously you have to put resources behind that. However, if you just want to test the market, then you can create a landing page, tailor the landing page to the variation on English on Canada or even do something on French or Canadian French and show some ads and paid and you will have that presence right away. So any, for whatever reason you want to stop the effort after six months, a year or something, you just pause your campaign and you don't have to sunset a portion of your website or redirect resources that you have invested already. So for testing market, for testing new product ideas, for even testing interest paid is great because allows you to get that feedback right away. And that benefit is something that for example for organic, it's also something that makes this strategy complicated because if you start creating content for your website for a specific topic again imagine here that we are comparing the case for HubSpot that has invested heavily on being the authority of on inbound. And imagine that they decide they don't want to be known for inbound anymore. It will be very hard for them to change because they have all this content already indexed. So they will have to eliminate it and it will take a while to be an upset or to be updated. So on SEO, your SEO strategy behaves like a large chip, like the Titanic. Once you start set a direction, you have to make a slow movement because it takes a long time for whatever change you have in mind to being reflected on search engines. So you have to really use your core business vision and mission and values to define what will be your SEO strategy. Because it's usually a long term play. And if you keep shifting ideas, if you keep shifting focus, then you will be wasting valuable money on the content that you have already created that will not be usable anymore and you will have to discard and remove from your website to give space for the new ideas that you have. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't change, but you really have to be very thoughtful on how do you reflect your content focus on your website when you are focused on SEO, so you have those benefits, speed and the ability to change. For SEO you have to be more tactful. But at the same time one of the largest issues with paid is that usually the searcher that clicks on organic results is in a research phase. It usually invests more time understanding the content on the website because it's usually the content that they see first from the companies for educational purposes. So by the time they want to do a commercial inquiry, they are very familiarized with the brand. And that trust has been built across the many interactions through organic and the fact that some users know very well that the result is organic and it's not being paid create a larger trust in the company and therefore usually that traffic and eventually leads and opportunities are better clients are better customers. It's not like it's a 100% rule, but usually that will happen. There's a higher level of trust between the visitor and the company when the organics come from the results come from organic. So it's something that you have to keep in mind is on paid you will have a lower trust threshold and usually you will convert a smaller percentage of your visitors into leads and therefore clients and they will start usually less than when they have come to your website through organic channels. Now that we have explored those differences, what you should do if you wonder should I star my search engine presence on paid or shall I do it on organic? Well, it depends on every case, but there are some few recommendations that I have. One of the of the recommendations is if you don't have really a good idea of what kind of content that you need to create that resonate with your clients or resonate with your potential audience, then starting with paid, especially for intent, it's a good idea because that will allow you to at least understand what the market is looking for. You might start at the beginning with very low or bottom of the funnel keywords that are really people that have commercial intent and you can go then a little bit in the middle of the funnel just to give to get an idea of what people are searching for and once you know what kind of searches are they doing and you discover that you are happy renting that traffic, but you want to own it, or you want to have a say on it getting for a larger portion of it for free, then you shift into creating content that might bring you that traffic for free. So that might be one strategy that you can test. Obviously there are companies that just start right away on content. They are really focus and they already know what they're looking for, so they start that way. And that's also a possibility. But especially if you are testing something new and especially if you are not that confident or patient on the effort long run, you can start with paid and once you get some wins, then you shift into organic on the long run. Right. So that's, that's for that topic. I hope that is helpful and makes sense. The only one that I have for today is related to goals in general for web analytics, but it's specifically for Google Analytics. And so let me, let me do here, let me prepare something right away so we can start exploring some ideas here. And the reason this is important is because most companies or most users will have Google Analytics already on their websites, but sometimes they might not be aware of the fact that they can track different goals. So what I'm showing here is in this case our Google Analytics account, we use it to track our website performance and as a test ground for some ideas that we eventually develop. And so here you can see how many people is visiting your website and some information about the demographics and how they got there. It's called acquisition. But sometimes you want your website to have specific goals in mind. You want your website to accomplish something. And in Google Analytics, and this is something shared with other platforms, you can do with other web analytics tools, but this one is very popular. There's a place where you can set up those goals. And today I want to explore the kind of goals that you can have on Google Analytics and what is the difference between all of them. So to get to that area, you go to your account and then select the property that you might have. As usually you have one property per website and then you select one of the views. In this case, usually there's like a master view or a view that have all the data unfiltered of the website. And there's this section called goals. And here you will see an area where you can create some of the goals. And I will just for the purposes of this demonstration, start with the new goal. So you can have different kinds of goals. I Usually select custom for the setup so we can see the types and these are the times. And I want to explore the different conditions where you will use them. So the most popular one is called Destination, and it's just a specific page that you want your users to visit. So for example, if I use our website as an example, we have our homepage, but we usually want people to visit this particular page, the let us talk, which is our commercial intent form. And, and when they fill this form, we send them to a thank you page, a page where we say, well, you know, thank you for reaching out. We will contact you pretty soon. And that particular page is one of our goals. We want more users to fill the form, obviously, because this gives us opportunities. So this could be an example of a destination, right? It's any page that is of value for a user for some companies is their thank you page. For other companies that, for example, sell software, usually the pricing page is a good one because that signals commercial intent. There are some cases where if you are selling your products directly on the platform and you have a page at the end of the process that says something like thank you or it's at the end of the checkout process, then maybe you are tracking that and you can have multiple pages. So you create a page based on that and that will be type destination. It's very simple, it's very straightforward. You can have multiple kind of them. You can use different rules. Let me put here a test. So you can see. You can use multiple rules to say, well, I want a specific URL. Or you can say something like I want any URL that begins with something like thank you. Or you can use something known as regular expressions, which is combinations of rules that allows you to have different things, like for example, this one, any page that either has let's talk or contact. So you can have multiple rules. That will be the first one. And you can verify if there's any people actually right now that matches the rules. So you can get an idea of something called conversion rate. So you have destination. Another way that you can measure success is through engagement. And while some people do not agree that duration by itself, it's an engagement metric, it's available on Google. And the way it works is you can say something like, well, of all the people that visit our website, less than 10% or less than 5% spend more than 30 minutes, 3 minutes on our website. And we know that the people that spend a little bit more time usually end up buying. So that will be one of your goals. You can say, I want people to at least spend 3 minutes, 2 minutes, 1 minute on our website. And we want to measure that. So you can select direction and the goal detail will change. Because now you have to specify the amount of. For example, imagine do you say to my goal is that people spend one minute on the website and you will get an idea how many, what percentage of people kind of like matches that threshold. And you have it available here the same thing. You can set up one of these duration thresholds. You can have many so you can tear them up and see how that show up in the results. The third one again is considered kind of like an engagement metric is pages or screen per session. And the logic on this one is if a person visit the website and just see, stay at the homepage and leave. Probably it wasn't that interest on the content. But if they start exploring the website and during one session look at two, three pages or more, then that might signal engagement. So you can test that. You can test the pages or the screens per session and you can set up a threshold as well. You can say well, I want to know or my goal is that as many people as possible visit or interact with three or more pages or screen per session. You put the number there and again here you can see or you can get an idea of what percentage of all your visitors perform that action. And you can have multiple goals related to pages per screen per session. Sorry too. Finally, for more complex setups, you have something called events. And events are things that can happen on the website that are of interest to you. Some examples can be an event can be someone clicking on a button or someone filling a form or someone performing a search on your website or scrolling right through it. So you can be very creative here you have that complexity available to you. It can be someone watching a video or staying again, scrolling to a certain point or actually just seeing an element of the website. This usually requires some kind of third party information, for example through tag manager or information coming from videos or from other providers. So it's a little bit more complex, but it's something that you can also perform. It requires way more information. There's something called category, actions, labels and values. I will not dive into it in this session. Maybe it's something that I will discuss in another one. But I will show you some events that we are tracking so you can have an idea of how that works. So that's the final one, events. And just to give you an idea of how they look like, you can, I can show you some of the things that we are tracking, for example, we track the amount of people that have a session that lasts longer than four minutes or the amount of people that see more than five pages per session. One example of an event will be this one, which is a phone call. We use a service that allow us to know what and someone pick up the phone because it's right now at that moment on the website. And that platform sends an event to Google Analytics and that event is categorized as a call. And we just want to know for first calls and any call that lasts more than 60 seconds because that is usually a signal that the conversation was worth having, right? Not some random person trying to maybe sell something or a robocall or something like that. So we use those definitions to create the goal. And once you have them, the way that you use them is that you can see information about them on your analytics. Like for example, for the key page view, which is the contact one, you will be able to see well out of all the visits that I have on the website, what percentage of people and actually went to the key page that I have. And you can drill down that information per channel. And in that way understand if whatever effort you are doing on any of the channels is working better for you or not. A simple comparison here is I have higher conversion rate for LinkedIn than Facebook when business come from organic, right? So just a simple thing that you can do with those goals, which kind you should use? Well, the ones that matter to you, the ones that are relevant to you, and the ones that allows you to make good decisions. So if you want to start simple, then you can start with simple destination goals and build up from that. If you really are in the, in the stage that you want to know, just engagement, then probably pages per session or duration will be good starting points to just get an idea of what kind of pages, what kind of channels are engaging more people over time. And eventually, if you really want to track very detailed ways on how people click some buttons, how people scroll through forms or scroll to pages or submit forms or watch videos, and you can set up different events on Google Analytics to try to track that, it will really depend on what you're trying to accomplish at any given moment. So that's an overview, quick overview of goals. I hope that is helpful. And those are the two topics that I have for today. I don't know if in this case, Donald, you have any question. I do not. Okay, that's great. And I will try during next sessions to focus on more specific aspects of Google Analytics over time. There are fascinating topics that we can discuss here about how do you understand acquisition channels and how do you explore the audience, So I will devote some of the time on our next sessions to dive into that. So for today, that will be all. For those that will watch this later or listen to it, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hopefully in the near future we'll have this information in a podcast. And in the meantime, if you are interested in participating on these sessions live, just subscribe or register to our Zoom meeting form on the website and I look forward to talking to you during the next session.