The basic point to keep
in mind is this: Paid search is your best option
for reaching people looking to make a purchase. SEO does
its best work reaching out to people doing research.

Before we go into how to
take make the best use of the two sides of search, you
need to understand who's searching to begin with. The
search population is basically broken into two groups:

· Researchers are looking
for more information on a topic. They don't know what
they want to find - and they might not want to find
anything specific just yet. They only want to know more.

· Purchasers know exactly
what they want. They're searching because they don't
know where to find it. At the most extreme, that could
be the searcher who knows exactly where she wants to fly
to for vacation, the type of hotel she wants to stay in,
and the price she's willing to pay; all she needs is the
best Web site to book everything on. In general,
purchasers are looking to do something (like book a
flight), rather than to learn something. (There are
plenty of searchers who want to do something specific,
but who aren't looking to buy anything - but we'll still
call them searchers, for the sake of simplicity. And you
can be a "purchaser" of information, too - looking to
subscribe to a particular magazine is one example.)

Of course, there is a
middle ground: people who have a pretty good idea of
what they want, but haven't worked out the kinks just
yet. Even if someone knows she wants to go on vacation
in Orlando, FL, there might be a lot of information -
like the kind of hotel she wants, or the flight length
she'll tolerate - that she's left undecided.

But, by and large, those
are the two types of people on search engines. And the
same person will transition from researcher to
purchaser, and maybe back to researcher, over time.
Before the woman looking to go to Orlando decides on her
exact itinerary, she might spend a long time researching
what kinds of things there are to do in Orlando, what
kinds of hotels there are, flight schedules - and even
whether Orlando is the right vacation spot for her. She
only moves into the "purchaser" category when she works
out all those details. And, once she books her flight
and hotel, there very well might be more things she
wants to learn about - where the best Orlando
restaurants are, for example - that will put her back
into "researcher" mode. Which starts the process over
again.

Search
engines/searchers, advertisers/purchasers. That's
the breakdown of who using search engines. Of course,
there's the second question of who's talking to the
searchers - the search engines and the advertisers. And
they follow a similar breakdown: the search engines are
researchers; the advertisers are purchasers.

Search engines are
researchers because they tackle keywords in the same way
researchers do. When searchers submit a query, the
search engines effectively ask about that keyword, "What
can I (the search engine) learn about this topic?" Once
they've gone through all the research, they pass it
along to the searchers. Often, that produces a very wide
range of results - as good initial research tends to.

Advertisers are
different. They're involved in the purchasing process.
Like purchasers, they're not interested in information;
they're interested in getting something done. So the
results that advertisers show are specific, and targeted
to reach a specific goal. Their whole approach to search
has nothing to do with information for its own sake, and
everything to do with making a sale. In other word, it's
a purchaser mentality. And it speaks to purchasers.

One good example is a
search for "school supplies" (a popular topic this time
of year). For that search, in Google, the first nine
organic results feature some school supply retailers, a
retailer that sells to schools, and the Web site of the
National School Supply and Equipment Association, (a
school supply trade organization). The list is also a
thoroughly wide range of school-supply related
information, only some of which will be relevant to any
given searcher interest.

By contrast, the vast
majority of pay-per-click ads for that term are focused
on a very specific goal: driving sales from searchers
looking to buy school supplies. With very little
exception, all the ads focused on selling school
supplies to school-supply "purchase" searchers (say,
parents or older students).

The organic listings
speak to researchers. The paid ads speak to purchasers.

SEO won't change
things. So organic search speaks much better to
researchers; paid search speaks much better to
purchasers. Of course, up until now, we've focused on
the way things are because they happen to be that way.
Paid search focuses on purchasers because advertisers
have decided to make it that way.

Organic search focuses on
researchers because the search engines design themselves
to do that. And so it's tempting to say that none of
this is inherent to the system - that if advertisers
changed the way they used SEM, and site designers made
better use of SEO to improve their organic ranking on
purchasing-related searches, all of this could change.

That assumption is
partially right. An advertiser can use SEM for branding,
for example - and, for branding purposes, can advertise
in ways that targets "researchers." It can be a highly
effective tactic. At the same time, good SEO can drive a
site's organic rankings up on "purchase" keywords -
regardless of search engines' organic/research
underpinnings.

But a major problem
remains. In paid search, the advertiser has control over
the landing page that an ad leads to. In organic search,
no matter how good your SEO is, the search engine has
the last say about the URL your listing leads to. And
because the search engines don't think like advertisers
- they think like researchers - relying entirely on SEO
might get you high listings on purchase terms; but the
pages on your site that come up might not be the best
ones to show a given searcher - and might even turn
searchers away.

You might want searchers
to go to a product page, say; the search engine might
send them to an "articles" page, a glossary entry, your
FAQ page - or a different purchasing page that's far
less useful for achieving your conversion goal.

Take an articles page.
Articles pages can be excellent for SEO, because they're
filled with content (so the search engines recognize
them as relevant for a the keywords that are used in
that article). They can also be used to drive article
readers to take an action, once they've read it. Indeed,
an excellent way to draw researchers to your site is to
use articles to boost your SEO, bring them to your site
from organic listings, and familiarize them with your
brand.

That's a great SEO tactic
for attracting researchers. But if a searcher looking to
make a purchase follows an organic link to an article on
your site, she might assume that your site isn't selling
anything (or might lack the patience or time to look for
your products page), press the back space, and proceed
to your competitor's site. You've lost a customer who
may never come back - and your competitor has gained
her. Meanwhile, if you're doing well enough in SEO to
rank high enough to draw purchaser traffic, you've
probably paid an SEO firm lots of money.