There are many departments in the company. Even in the digital marketing department, there are multiple groups or teams. While they are all working for the ultimate goal of the company’s business growth, in many cases, each team works independently. This is the case with many companies’ paid advertising such as Google Ads and search engine optimization (SEO), though their work closely impacts each other.

What is Co-Optimization?

The concept of paid and organic co-optimization is to share each other’s project strategies and to work together by supporting each other’s pain points to bring better performance to the company. When this works, the company will achieve higher results with the same or lower cost.

What and How to Optimize

The search engines are the best platform for paid and organic co-optimization as both the paid advertising team and SEO team are working on it. You’ve probably seen the ads from the same company appear above their organic results when you search.

When these two teams don’t work together or exchange any information, the paid ads could take away many clicks/traffic from the organic listings. While the company may receive the same number of traffic from the search engines, it costs more since you are paying for the ad clicks. Both paid ads and organic listings have their own value. But, by exchanging the information, and working together, the company could obtain more traffic from the search results with the same or lower cost.

For example, review the paid ads keyword list and organic keyword ranking. If you are organically ranking at the top, you could lower the bid cost for the keyword or even remove the keyword from the paid campaign. You could then re-allocate the saved cost to other keywords or even expand the target audience if that’s what you want. Of course, if you are using a different page as a paid ads’ landing page from the page ranking at the top organically, it’s perfectly fine to bid on that keyword. Even in this case, it would be good for the organic team to be aware of which keywords are used in the paid campaign that are possibly cannibalizing.

Working with other Departments

The co-optimization doesn’t end just between the paid and organic teams. For example, the tag lines used in the commercial can be used in the paid ads. The landing page can be optimized for organic search. The questions and requests that come to the help desk are great topics for website content, which can be optimized to bring traffic.

One of the hurdles for different teams to work together comes from how the team’s performance is evaluated. When the company reviews them separately for each success, they won’t work together. The paid team doesn’t want to lose traffic to organic and vice versa. When the company evaluates the success of a larger department while checking the needs and results of each team as contributions, you create an environment for them to work together.