Online marketers in every industry are challenged with some important decisions as we go deep in to 2014 Marketing plans. I am flooded with so many important issues as to make my online marketing campaign Successful. 

  Here are big questions that are popping in my Head;

Do we allocate more money in content marketing and less in technical SEO and paid search?

 Should we keep on spending for paid media at all?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of the different channels and choices? As always, there are no hard and fast rules to help guide our decision making, but there are some strong clues out there.

Let's take a look at some of the big News in onlinemarketing industry. 

Google has sounded it clear that it will no longer bear artificial link building schemes and keyword stuffing tricks. In fact, Google wants us to worry about one thing only—semantic search. What's that?

"Semantic search provides more meaningful search results by evaluating and understanding the search phrase and finding the most relevant results in a website, database or any other data repository." —Techopedia.com

Our hardcore approach to trying to "get found" on search engines needs to evolve. Instead of trying hard to "rank" on high traffic keyword phrases, we need to understand what potential customers are looking for and tailor our content and messaging to be a perfect match. That's one of the reasons why content marketing is so important these days. Copywriting and SEO strategy need to be perfectly in sync in order to produce high quality traffic and leads from search engines.

Search is still significant because it's not an inactive activity. People don't just stumble upon your content like they might elsewhere—they're looking for it (if your content is the right match to a semantic query). An Organic Search lead has already qualified you somewhat by performing a relevant search, which means he enters your sales funnel at a relatively advanced stage in the buyer journey. In fact, by my own experience, organic search had the highest customer conversion rate among all of the inbound and outbound marketing channels.

Certainly, there are challenges to SEO these days, particularly Google's move to obscure search data from marketers and the predominance of PPC ads on the SERPs. Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird algorithm changes have made it harder to gain a foothold and move up the page rankings. SEO takes more time and effort than ever before because it requires a sustained flow of high quality, shared, authoritative content and strong links to Google+ and other social channels. In other words, you can't game the system anymore. You have to earn your way up the ladder.

As you might anticipate, faced with the challenges of Google's moving targets, many companies have allocated  more budget to paid search. In fact, according to Forbes, "72 percent of businesses surveyed reported they plan to spend more on PPC in 2014, up from 70 percent who increased spending in 2013." Google Adwords has some significant advantages over organic search now. Among them:

·         Google ads, maps, image carousels and other fun features now push organic search results below the fold for many popular searches

·         For research queries with a good chance of purchase (like "cheap movie tickets"), Google ad click-through are 10 times higher than organic search clicks

·         Google ads are often the most relevant results for products and other specific searches

·         The average CTR of a Google display ad is significantly higher than either Facebook ads or banner ads

Paid search faces challenges of its own, however. In case you haven't noticed, Google is now labeling PPC ads with yellow "Ad" icons to make sure searchers see them clearly as ads. This may or may not affect click-through rates. The other big challenge is, of course, competition for high-value natural search keyword phrases. Big brands with big PPC budgets make it difficult for SMBs to compete, especially for high-volume, short-tail phrases like "digital marketing." Many marketers are experimenting with retargeting and native advertising as an alternative to PPC. Those channels tend to be even more expensive, but will their conversion rates make them more cost effective? We'll see, but it may be worth an experiment or two for sure.

In my opinion, it's too early to decide on either SEO or PPC, and it's probably not a good idea to put all of your marketing budgets in one place. Clearly, we must play nice with Google and work on aligning buyer personas, content marketing and SEO. We also need to rethink PPC and focus on ad campaigns that align well with semantic search—i.e. create ads that deliver a perfect match for a potential buyer query and work hard to reduce the high-cost, low-quality clicks through constant monitoring and testing. It's probably time to consider other channels as well, such as retargeting and native advertising to reach new buyers who aren't necessarily searching for our goods and services. As always, driving any of these ads to A/B tested landing pages and measuring conversions is the best way to evaluate performance and value.