I have the great pleasure of introducing Augustine Fou, a Marketer who has the enviable distinction of having graduated from MIT at the age of 23 with a PHD. He works as a Faculty member at NYU and also as a consultant in the retail and beverage arena. He co-authored this post with the help of David Schoenberger.

Top marketers cite search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) among the top 5 preferred online marketing tactics, according to an eMarketer study from 1Q2008. In this “age of too much info” consumers tune out all “noise” until such time they need something or are researching something. At that time, they go online and do a search. If your company or website does not show up on the first page of results, you don’t exist. If your company or website does show up but does not provide what the consumer is looking for after they click through to your website they will never come back – they may even tell their friends to not waste their time there either.

In this new landscape of super-savvy web users, SEO and SEM have become critically important elements in the marketing mix of any company. But because historically SEO and SEM have been “add on” tactics to “traditional” digital marketing such as display ads, online sponsorships, page takeovers, etc. they have been added by way of the services of additional vendors. That led to the disciplines of SEO, SEM, website analytics, and website design being performed by different parties, most of whom do not regularly communicate or share data with one another.

This is an incredibly suboptimal, and potentially a dangerous way to operate. Let’s use a few examples to illustrate.

SEO | Website Content

Your website or a page from your website will show up in natural search results (the main middle part of a Google search engine results page) if it has content related to the search term or phrase submitted by the user. Search engine optimization requires the editing, optimizing, or adding of content to pages on your site to better tune them to specific keywords that users are searching for so they show up higher in the list of results – preferably on the first page. Having one vendor do SEO while another does web design and content (and knowing that the two don’t talk or share sufficiently) makes this task very difficult, if not impossible.

SEM | Website Analytics

Your website ad will show up in paid search results (the top and right margin of a Google search engine results page — labeled “Sponsored Results”) based on the keywords you purchased. The big question here becomes what keywords to buy, beyond the obvious ones and which ones are bought by other advertisers and are, therefore, very expensive. Website analytics provide data about what keywords people used to reach your website, some of which are less than obvious. This provides a starting point to expand the list of keywords to pay for and it may yield some “long tail” keywords that are more cost effective in bringing visitors to your site. Having different vendors do SEM and analytics (again) may lead to inefficiencies like unnecessary keyword expense and, equally, not selecting the right keywords in the first place.

SEO | SEM

Your website may show up in natural search results and also in paid results. However, this is redundant and may even artificially depress overall click-thru rates for users can only click one link from the whole Google search engine results page (natural and paid results included). In other words, displaying 2 or more links to the same page when users can only click one of them artificially increases the denominator in the equation: clicks / impression; and hence artificially depresses click rate. If a site already ranks very highly in natural results, there may be no need to pay for placement in the paid search area — i.e. costs can be saved. This requires the parties doing SEO and SEM respectively to coordinate with each other to optimize against natural and paid, and avoid redundancies and unnecessary costs.

Conclusion

The above examples illustrate the potential inefficiencies of doing SEO, SEM, website analytics, and website content in a vacuum or independently of each other. They also illustrate the interdependence and the necessary interplay between the disciplines. When they do work together as part of the overall marketing mix, inefficiencies, inaccuracies, and unnecessary costs are eliminated. In fact, SEO + SEM + Analytics + Content done in a synergistic way can make your digital marketing far more powerful.

(Images) (Comic)