If you’ve spent much time at all looking into promoting your website, you’ve probably seen terms such as “organic search engine optimization” and “keyword search marketing” come up from time to time. These are really each an entire specialty of their own, but this excerpt gives a bare-bones description and an argument why manipulating the key phrases on your site (organic SEO) may be more worthwhile than buying sponsored listings (keyword marketing).
Why not just pay per click?
Image via CrunchBase
Businesses, now more than ever, are using Google to market their products and services as they realize the abundance of targeted traffic it provides.This then poses the question: do you optimize your website to appear in Google’s natural search listings or do you pay to be placed in the sponsored listings?
It can sometimes seem an easy option just to pay for results, but is it really the right decision?
In a recent study, Google found that searchers were 72% more likely to click on a natural listing rather than a pay-per-click advert. This shows that although you can pay to get your website seen at the top of Google, it is not as effective as having it appear there naturally.
Searchers look for relevance in the adverts they click on, in the same way that Google looks for relevance in the websites it shows in its natural listings. This is why natural search offers a much greater conversion rate: People know that the natural listings will tend to be more relevant to their search as they cannot be bought, only earned….
The main benefit of natural listings is that they are free to earn and maintain. There are no click prices or fees as with pay per click. This is not to say that pay per click is not worth doing, just that the natural listings are deemed more relevant and cost-effective.
~Ben Norman, Getting Noticed on Google (p. 12)
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