BMA/Chicago convened an interesting panel program on both b-to-b SEO and SEM at its Nov. 19 Breakfast RoundTable at IIT’s Stuart School of Business.

Titled SEO and SEM: A Match Made Online and led and moderated by Jennifer Howard, head of B2B markets, central region, Google, the program featured four search expert panelists:

• Jeff Woelker, senior digital strategist at Slack Barshinger

• Kristen Nomura, search and analytics manager at Google

• S. Ryan DeShazer, director of interactive strategy at HSR Business-to-Business

• Lisa Schmitt, Interactive Marketing Media Manager at USG Corporation

Jen Howard opened the program with a brief explanation of the difference between SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing). For those new to these terms, SEO encompasses techniques to influence organic or natural search results. SEM involves techniques to buy and place paid ads as high as possible on generally the right margin of Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). She also pointed out that b-to-b executives tend to use Google at a slightly higher rate than do their B-to-C peers.

After this brief background, the panel immediately jumped into a lively round-robin session of Q&A.  The following is a highlight of the questions and answers from this session:

Q:  What are the advantages and disadvantages of SEO and SEM?

A:  The panel agreed that SEO is the more powerful of the two options, but noted that because SEO is based on the ability of your Web site to index well against relevant phrases, it is nearly impossible to get high SEO rankings against every possible search phrase that is valuable to your business. While the pqanel acknowledged that SEM tends to get lower click rates than what SEO returns, members noted that SEM gives advertisers the ability to be much more targeted and specific in their keyword targeting. After a brief side-discussion about the reletive costs of SEO vs. SEM, the panel agreed that neither is truly free as SEO executed properly takes a good deal of effort and vigilance.

Q: How do you see SEO and SEM best working together?

A:  While most panelists viewed SEM as the solution for providing a presence in  the SERP for terms that your SEO program is not addressing, SEO takes more time to get results, so even in key words that your SEO program is designed to cover, SEM can be useful early in a program to provide quick coverage for important keywords and phrases. HSR’s DeShazer also mentioned an Enquiro study that suggests that a presence in both SEO and SEM SERP results in brand lift.

Q:   What are the risks of employing only SEO or SEM?

A:  The panelists agreed that the main risk is one of coverage and cost effectiveness. While SEO will generate more clicks and, in our experience, more engaged site visits, SEM gives you the ability to get difficult keywords covered quickly and in a very targeted way.

Q:  How is search budget allocation determined?

A:  Woelker responded by saying there really are two questions here: How do you determine budget in terms of media spend and how do you determine the allocation between search engines once you’ve decided your overall budget. To the first point, Jeff explained that there are a number of ways to determine your search budget allocation—all based on your marketing objectives. If you are going for a straight lead acquisition, you can determine how many leads you need, then calculate how much traffic you need to generate to obtain those leads, and finally back into the cost needed to generate those leads. You can also just allot a fixed dollar amount that you are comfortable with and then work forward to see how many leads you can generate based on that budget and try to get your cost per lead or cost per acquisition down from there.

To the second question, how do you decide how to allot dollars to each search engine, Jeff noted an easy way to start if you don’t already have a campaign in place is to use market share to determine how to divide your budget. “Google currently has almost 60% of market share and as such would receive 60% of your budget. If you have previous metrics in place, that should help determine your campaign. This could be a cost per lead, cost per acquisition, time spent with brand, or whatever metric you have in place that allows you to decide where to budget your dollars.”

Overall, this was a highly informative session, with quite a bit of audience participation in the Q&A.  As a b-to-b marketer, I think the main takeaways were as follows:

1. Google seems to be even more dominant in the b-to-b search space
2. SEO is the more  powerful of search tactics, generating site visitors with deeper engagement levels, but it takes more time and effort to cover fewer keywords and phases.
3. SEM is the quicker and more inclusive solution for getting your search campaign up and running, but it will not match SEO in the quality and quantity of visits.
4. An effective search campaign usually will need both SEO and SEM to be successful.