Together with my buddy Amit Mehta yesterday, we had a great call with Seer Interactive founder Wil Reynolds (right) for our Super Affiliate Accelerator program.

We were talking about how paid search and organic search were converging, and the role of search engine optimization, even for PPC marketers.

Some examples of the convergence of SEO and PPC:

You can study your top converting PPC keywords and develop content pages based around them to attract organic traffic. (One of the strategies that Aaron Wall mentions in SEO Book).

In addition, I use the reverse method: Looking at the high traffic (and more importantly, converting!) keywords from either my AWStats account or Google Analytics from my niche blogs or HTML content sites, and creating PPC campaigns based on them (Highly targeted traffic mechanisms like Google Adwords Placement Targeting tool -formerly known as site-targeting – let you take a crack at attracting traffic with sniper-like accuracy).

So with PPC-SEO convergence, it’s very much a 2-way street.

Some highlights from Wil:

Diversify to break out of what everyone else is doing: Most affiliates will use 1 or 2 keyword tools in their research process. Wil uses 7 or 8. He might have as many as 17 tabs open on his browser during the research process.

Some of the tools he uses includes:

• Microsoft AdLab
• Yahoo Site Assist (Google for it..ironically it’s a search engine UNFRIENDLY URL)
• eBay Pulse

And if you’ve been keeping up with SEO developments, you’d know that searcher mindset and intent are going to be key.

So in line with what I’ve been doing in demographic/psychographic profiling, Microsoft’s AdLab will not just let you harvest your visitors keywords, it will give you tools to understand the demographics – age, sex, education, location of your visitors.

Together with tools like Google Trends, and Quintura (useful for lateral keyword/thematic research), you can build a pretty comprehensive profile.

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I predict that going forward, smart affiliates are going beyond merely harvesting converting keywords in a product-centered model, and move closer to the visitor in a consumer-centered model.

To some it may not be an obvious difference yet, but it’s going to be something that separates the Super Affiliates from the regular affiliates, as PPC bid prices and organic search algorithms continue to weed out the weaker players from the market in a Darwinian game of “search engine evolution”.