With increasing costs and competition in search, marketers must continue to be creative to achieve a high return on advertising spend. One answer may be fusion search, which is a method of “fusing” data to execute multiple search techniques simultaneously. These methods include pay-per-click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO) and, more recently, social media optimization (SMO) and video SEO.
PPC is at the top of the list for two basic reasons. First, there is no other method that can deliver more data in less time. Also, PPC data will allow you to identify the long-tail keywords that you will use in your fusion campaign (provided you did your keyword research). Fusion campaigns are based on those long-tail keywords that cost little and return a lot.
For example, let’s say you’re running an account for a travel client that sells trips to the Bahamas. You’ll likely come up with several thousand keywords that include misspellings, buying phrases, long-tail and competitor domains. After identifying these keywords, you can run a PPC campaign and begin accumulating your data.
Search marketers know that “Bahamas trip” will elicit high volume and a low conversion rate. It will also be expensive and highly competitive, which will result in a cost per action that your client may or may not be able to afford. Savvy search marketers will begin mining their PPC data for the thousands of long-tail terms they added, such as “Bahamas cruises” or “looking for the best price on a Bahamas cruise,” that have one to two conversions over a sufficient data period (let’s say two weeks). You would then utilize these long-tail or “fusion” keywords to formulate a multifaceted search campaign across the other channels at your disposal that include SEO, SMO and video SEO.
For SMO, you could create a lens on HubPages, a popular social media site, that centers around your keyword “looking for the best price on a Bahamas cruise” and will link to your client’s site. With the right methodology, your client’s site and the HubPages lens will likely get ranked organically for “looking for the best price on a Bahamas cruise.”
For video SEO — assuming that the client has video content or you create it for them — you can tag that video with the same keyword used in the above example and use specific techniques to get your video ranked for that keyword.
You’ve now utilized your data to fuse the highest converting, lowest competition keywords into an extremely effective, multi-faceted strategy, which will achieve a higher return as well as build long-term organic reach.
Adam Riff is director of search at MediaWhiz. Reach him at [email protected].
