SEO + PPC + CSEs = Total Coverage

I am currently doing a bit of personal development by spending regular time with the PPC team to learn what they do, and to find areas where our two departments can help and learn from each other. “Synergy” if you speak business-talk.

We recently had a session looking at the Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) feeds that we run, and an interesting point came out of it. This point was about the amount of coverage a brand could have on a single SERP where there are Natural Search results, Paid Search results, and Product results from Google Product Search.

What are CSE’s?

Comparison Shopping Engines are sites like Shopping.com, Nextag, and Ciao, where retailers can submit a product feed of all their current stock, and these sites can then provide their users with huge lists of products in a selection of categories. Retailers can gain incremental sales from users who may not have used search in their purchase process. The CSEs make their money from charging a CPC on all the referrals to the retailer sites.

Google Product Search is a similar to the other CSEs in the way it takes a product feed, but the results are often embedded in the Natural Search results:

The perfect SERP

After our discussions we started mentally constructing a SERP where a brand could be absolutely everywhere…..
Here it is – the actual SERP used is just for layout, so please ignore sites highlighted: (click to enlarge!)

Key

1.    Your Paid results, because you are bidding on this term. Additionally, you could be displaying an “Adwords Plus” result with site links, or a location – effectively dominating the top Paid results.
2.    Your Natural results, because your site is optimised for this term. If you had an indented result as well, you would be dominating the top Natural results.
3.    The Google Product results, in which you are present because you are submitting your feed to Google. These results have ratings taken from CSEs that your site could have.

Those are the obvious ones, and the ones that are going to drive you direct traffic, but we also have:
4.    A Nextag (for instance) PPC result, where they are bidding on the same term, but you feature on their landing page because they have your feed. We have seen many examples of CSEs bidding on product terms.
5.    A Ciao (for instance) Natural result where they are ranking for this term as well, but you feature on their landing page because they have your feed. A lot of these sites will rank very well for some competitive product terms, and your brand could be on their landing page.

This is a bit of a dream SERP for a brand, and I have not actually seen this anywhere, but this would truly be a great example of the benefits of a multi channel marketing campaign, of Paid and Natural Search synergy, and of TOTAL SERP DOMINATION!