Last year, we ran an interview with Vertical Leap’s Managing Director, Chris Pitt, on the topic of search marketing data. One of the key takeaways from the interview was the relationship between share of search and market share.
Here’s a reminder of what Chris had to say at the time:
“One thing people in the industry are talking about a lot at the moment is share of search as an indicator of your overall market share. And this concept is gaining a lot of traction as if it’s a new idea – and I’m not disagreeing with it – but the search industry has been saying this kind of thing for years.” – Chris Pitt, Vertical Leap Managing Director
In fact, Chris goes on to argue that share of search is more than representative of market share.
“It goes back to separating that online and offline activity again where people are saying search volume is representative of the market share when, actually, it is your market share.”
You can’t maximise your share of search without, first, maximising search visibility across all of the platforms that matter to you and your customers – whether this includes Google, Bing, Amazon and more.
Cover the entire marketing funnel
We’ve discussed how SEO and PPC list to data capture different leads across the marketing funnel so the obvious benefit of running these two channels alongside each other is that you can cover the whole funnel with your search marketing strategy.
As stated earlier in this article, the vast majority of your leads at any one time will come from the top of the funnel – ie: they’re not ready to buy yet. These leads require nurturing through the following stages of the funnel with interactions that keep them engaged with your brand so you’re in pole position when the time comes to make the purchase.
Double impressions by combining organic & paid placements
We discuss this exact point in our now you’re probably wondering article explaining why you need PPC, even if your SEO strategy is doing great. It’s an extension of maximising search visibility but we’re specifically looking at cases where you show PPC and SEO listings on the same results page.
In this scenario, we’ve got a query demonstrating high purchase intent by specifying a precise product number, which suggests the user is looking for the best deal available. Here, we can see Samsung doubling up its chances of winning the click with placements in the feed of product listing ads and the second spot in organic results.
Google data shows that ranking in the top organic spots and the top pack of ads on the same results page can significantly increase your share of clicks.
With double impressions, you’re not only taking up more space on the results page and making yourself more visible, but also reducing the space available for competitors to capture leads from your most important queries.
Increase brand recall with double impressions
Another benefit of double impressions china business directory is they increase brand recall – the strength of memory users retain about your brand and/or message. Google calls this “double brand exposure” and the search giant finds users retain more information about brands and their messages when they rank in both paid and organic top positions for the same query.