What Is Search Marketing? A Practical Guide To SEO, PPC And Winning The Modern SERP

If you stripped away every other channel and kept only the one that reliably brings in high-intent visitors, most brands would keep search.

Across industries, combined organic and paid search typically account for around two-thirds of all trackable website traffic, far ahead of social, display and referral channels. 

Organic search alone often delivers just over half of total trackable visits, and it does so with visitors who are already looking for a solution. 

For B2B companies, the picture is even more skewed. Some analyses estimate that combined search can account for more than 70 to 75 percent of traffic. 

If you ignore search, you are essentially opting out of the main place people go when they are actively researching, comparing or ready to buy.

That is where search marketing comes in.

What is search marketing, exactly?

At its simplest, search marketing is the practice of gaining traffic and visibility from search engines using both paid and unpaid tactics.

There are three related terms that often get confused:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

  The work you do to earn visibility in the organic results. That includes technical fixes, content, links and user signals that help search engines understand and rank your pages. 

• PPC (Pay Per Click) / Paid Search

  The ads that appear at the top and bottom of search results when you bid on keywords in platforms such as Google Ads and Microsoft Ads. You pay only when someone clicks.

• SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

  Some marketers use SEM to describe only paid search. Others use it as an umbrella term that includes both SEO and PPC. Industry guides now often treat “search marketing” as the umbrella, with SEO and SEM/PPC as its two main branches. 

In this article, we will treat search marketing as the broader discipline and talk about how both sides work together.

Pillar 1: SEO, the compounding engine

SEO is the slow build that pays you back for years if you get the fundamentals right.

Google’s own documentation describes SEO as helping search engines understand your content and helping users find your site and decide whether to visit. 

In practice, that breaks into four big jobs.

1. Make your site easy to crawl and understand

Technical SEO is the foundation. If search engines cannot reach or interpret your pages, nothing else matters.

Key elements include:

• Clean site architecture so bots can move through your pages without dead ends or loops.

• Fast loading pages that pass modern performance benchmarks, which also tend to convert better. 

• Correct use of canonical tags, redirects and sitemaps so search engines know which URLs to index.

• Structured data (schema) that marks up content such as products, FAQs, articles, reviews and local information in a way machines can understand.

You do not need a perfect score everywhere, but you do need a site that is technically healthy and easy to crawl.

2. Build content around topics, not just keywords

The era of thin, keyword-stuffed pages is long over. The content that ranks now tends to:

• Cover a topic in depth instead of answering one narrow query.

• Show real-world expertise and experience.

• Align with user intent, whether someone is researching, comparing or ready to act.

Modern SEO content strategies focus on topical authority. That means mapping a cluster of related keywords to a set of connected pages and internally linking between them, rather than publishing one disconnected blog post at a time. 

If your business sells email marketing software, for example, you do not just target “email marketing tool.” You build a cluster around onboarding, deliverability, automations, templates, benchmarks and so on, then organize it so both users and crawlers can move through the topic easily.

3. Earn authority and trust

Backlinks still matter. Independent research continues to show that links from credible sites correlate strongly with higher rankings, because they act as endorsements. 

The shift is in how you earn those links:

• Publishing original research, data studies and strong reference content.

• Partnering with relevant publications and creators in your category.

• Being genuinely useful so people want to cite you.

Instead of buying random blog links, the goal is to become the resource people turn to when they need to explain or support something in your niche.

4. Measure what actually matters

SEO is not “free traffic”. There is real cost in content, engineering and time. So you track it like a performance channel, not just a ranking game.

Core metrics include:

• Conversions and revenue from organic traffic.

• Growth in organic traffic and impressions over time.

• Visibility for your most important topics and commercial keywords. 

Done well, SEO becomes a compounding engine. Once you rank for meaningful queries, you can receive qualified traffic every month without paying for each click.

Pillar 2: PPC, the fast lane

Paid search is the “switch on today, see results today” side of search marketing.

In most benchmark studies, well-run PPC campaigns generate around two dollars in revenue for every one dollar spent, an average 200 per cent return on ad spend. 

That does not mean every campaign hits that number, but it shows why search ads remain a core channel.

How paid search works in practice

At a high level, you:

1. Choose keywords you want your ads to show for.

2. Write ads that match the intent behind those queries.

3. Set bids and budgets.

4. Send clicks to tightly aligned landing pages.

5. Let the auction system decide when and where your ads show.

The nuance is in targeting and control. Match types, negative keywords, audience layers, device and location settings, and bidding strategies all decide whether you are buying profitable intent or burning budget on noise. 

Where PPC shines

Paid search is especially powerful when you need:

• Immediate visibility for a new product, campaign or market.

• Coverage for highly competitive terms, where organic rankings will take time.

• Control over message and offer, including tests you do not want indexed long term.

• Tight targeting, for example, only people in a specific city searching on mobile during business hours.

Because you can see performance by keyword, ad and audience almost in real time, PPC becomes your lab for understanding which messages and offers actually move people to act.

Why SEO and PPC are better together

In many organizations, SEO and PPC are still run as separate teams with separate budgets and separate dashboards. That is increasingly inefficient.

When you treat them as one search marketing system, three big advantages appear.

1. Shared keyword universe

Your organic data shows which queries drive qualified traffic over time. Your paid data shows which keywords convert and at what cost.

When you combine those, you can:

• Use organic winners to decide where to push the budget in PPC.

• Use paid search terms data to uncover new content opportunities in SEO.

• Spot cannibalization or overlap where you are paying for clicks you are already winning organically.

2. More real estate on the modern SERP

Modern results pages are stacked with ads, AI answers, featured snippets, image and video carousels, “People Also Ask” boxes and local packs. 

If your brand appears only once, you get one chance to be noticed. If you appear as:

• A paid ad at the top.

• An organic listing.

• A video result or image.

• A citation within an AI Overview.

You start to feel like the default choice in that category.

Given that AI-generated summaries in search are already appearing in a significant share of queries and are rapidly expanding, especially in markets like the United States and India, this multi-surface visibility becomes even more important. 

3. Smarter testing and budgeting

Paid search lets you test value propositions, headlines and offers in days. Once you find winners, you can bake that language into your SEO content and metadata.

On the flip side, SEO performance over quarters can guide where you reduce paid coverage because organic has taken over, and where you need to keep buying visibility because competition or AI layouts are suppressing organic clicks.

The result is not “SEO vs PPC,” but search marketing as one coordinated demand engine.

Search marketing in an AI and zero-click world

One of the biggest shifts in the last couple of years is the rise of zero-click searches and AI-generated overviews in search results.

More queries now end on the results page itself, with users reading summaries, featured snippets or structured answers instead of clicking through to individual sites. 

That does not make search marketing obsolete, but it does change the game:

• You are not only optimizing for blue links. You are optimizing to be cited, quoted or used as source material in AI answers and rich features.

• Entity clarity matters. Clear branding, consistent information and structured data increase your chances of being referenced. 

• Brand search becomes more valuable. If people remember your name from an AI answer or panel and then search you directly, the search has still done its job.

In this environment, the brands that win are the ones that produce genuinely helpful, well-structured content and combine it with strong technical SEO and thoughtful PPC coverage of commercial terms.

A simple way to start your search marketing plan

You do not need a 100-page deck to begin. You do need a clear, joined-up plan.

1. Clarify goals and economics

   Decide what you actually want from search: leads, free trials, transactions, demo requests, or store visits. Put approximate values on those actions so you can judge ROI across SEO and PPC.

2. Map your search demand

   Use keyword tools, internal search data and customer interviews to understand what people are searching for at each stage, from “what is…” to “best…” to “pricing” and “vs” comparisons.

3. Split roles for SEO and PPC

   
   

   • Use SEO for deep educational content, category leadership and evergreen demand.

   • Use PPC for high-intent keywords, time-sensitive campaigns and competitive brand terms while your organic presence grows.

   
   

4. Design for the full SERP, not just one link

   Think about how you can show up in organic results, ads, videos, images, local packs and, where relevant, AI summaries.

5. Measure and adjust together

   Look at one search marketing report that shows organic and paid side by side, along with cost, revenue and key assisted metrics. Rebalance where you over- or underinvest.

Final thought

Search marketing is no longer a checkbox where you “do some SEO” and run a few branded search ads.

It is the infrastructure behind how people discover, evaluate and choose you. When you treat SEO and PPC as two sides of one strategy, designed for a changing SERP and AI-driven world, search stops being a channel you maintain and becomes a system that continually brings you qualified demand.

That is the real job of search marketing today.