Some retailers are hooked on paid search. They see it far outweighing other search-oriented efforts. But, experts says, they are overlooking an important aspect of search engine marketing: natural search.

Unlike paid search, for which the cost of keywords is rising and return on investment getting harder to find, search engine optimization remains a cost-effective method for generating sales and site traffic, and building brand awareness.

Merchants are missing the boat on maximizing natural search, says Brian Klais, vice president of search for Netconcepts, a search engine and web site optimization firm. Natural search ought to be treated as an ad channel rather than a marketing effort that is driven more by the I.T. department because of the need for constant page management to make them visible to search engine spiders.

By treating search engine optimization as an ad channel, as opposed to a time and labor intensive process of optimizing page content, experts suggest, retailers can effectively broaden the reach of their catalog to shoppers at a much lower cost than buying keywords for paid search ads.

Retailers with 50,000 or more SKUs can’t necessarily afford to market them all using paid search, says Rahmon Coupe, CEO of YourAmigo, a global search marketing firm. Search engine optimization allows retailers to market more product lines by generating additional category and subcategory landing pages that search spiders can crawl, so those products convert at a cost lower than paid search.

But paid search plays an important role and it cannot be pushed aside, experts say. As such, careful consideration should be given to how paid search and natural search can work together.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to manage and attention to detail, says Stuart Larkins, vice president of search marketing for search marketing firm DoubleClick Performics. Some retailers will tell themselves they can get an immediate impact with paid search, so why not put more of their money behind paid.

Instead, retailers need to be thinking more about how to strike a balance between search engine optimization and paid search, Larkins says. When properly managed, he says, SEO will create a lot of synergies with paid search that broadens the reach of the overall search campaign.

A limited view of search engine optimization is not always prudent, adds Jeanine Belsky, vice president of retail for 360i, a digital marketing firm. Retailers need to holistically manage their spending between paid and search engine optimization, Belsky contends. SEO is a way to hedge search marketing spending.

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