Maintaining a Balance Between Paid & Organic Search
By Paul Elliott, Partner, Search and Media
It’s no secret that the Internet is a powerful tool for new customer education and acquisition. For almost a decade, pure play and traditional retailers have been leveraging this powerful channel to attract customers and drive online and brick-and-mortar store sales.
In the financial services sector, branch/agent locators, interactive calculators, online banking, bill pay, and online applications are commonplace on most sites. However, the online marketing required to attract new customers to these sites is not.
Many regionally-focused retail banks and insurance companies have assumed that organic search engine optimization was not an option, due to the required regionalization of their web sites. Others simply have not made organic optimization a priority, indicating a lack of recognition for the value of strong organic rankings.
Search engines leverage software applications called spiders to discover the content on web sites. If a site visitor (or a search engine spider) is required to enter a zip code or similar regionalization element before getting to content, it becomes impossible for the search engines to access and index that content. The likelihood is very low that the web site will rank favorably for popular or competitive search engine queries.
The common response to this dilemma by financial institutions has been to ignore the “free” organic listings and invest in pay-per-click (PPC) search engine marketing. With PPC, it is not necessary to make site alterations in order to gain highly visible placement on the search engine results page (SERP). Instead, top paid listings are awarded to those advertisers that are willing to pay the most for each click of their listing, combined with those who achieve the strongest click-through-rate (CTR).
While investing in pay-per-click is an important and effective business decision, organic search engine optimization should be a critical part of the online marketing mix. Regardless of which study you read or which statistics you choose to believe, a large percentage of consumers prefer to click on organic listings over pay-per-click listings. Additionally, many consumers equate strong organic rankings with expertise in the associated field.
With this in mind, successful financial service institutions who desire to fully leverage the online channel can no longer afford to ignore organic search listings. With a well thought strategy, a little creativity, development of user focused content, and minor changes to site architecture, it is possible to have your cake…and regionalize it too.
Rosetta and their search marketing practice have a long history of providing innovative online marketing solutions that help their clients overcome obstacles to achieve multi-channel success. Rosetta’s extensive knowledge of financial services and insurance and their search marketing expertise form a powerful combination.
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