organic search results
No, it does not have anything to do with a higher priced section in the produce department at the grocery store. Organic search results are listings in search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being advertisements, or paid placements. Because so few ordinary users (38 percent, according to Pew) realized that many of the highest placed “results” on search engine results pages were actually advertisements, it became important to distinguish between the two types of content. As the perspective among general users was that all the results were in fact “results,” the qualifier “organic” was invented to distinguish the real search results from the advertisements. Because the distinction is important (and the word “organic” has many useful metaphorical uses), the term is now in widespread use within the search engine optimization and web marketing industry.
Another way to understand an organic search is that it’s a search which returns results by indexing pages based on content and keyword relevancy. This is in contrast to listings ranked based on who paid the most money to appear at the top. Sometimes this is called “pure” or “natural search,” as it is supposed to be “untainted” by commercial payments or bids.
Let’s break down the benefits of organic search results vs. paid search results. Brian Halligan with HubSpot.com simplifies the difference below:
1. If you rank high for organic results, it is (typically) long-lasting. So, the time/money you spend helping yourself move up the ranks is relatively persistent, while the PPC (pay per click) campaign is money spent over and over again.
2. Organic search results are clicked on a lot more than paid results, especially for well-educated crowds. I read a study that showed dramatic differences as you moved from high school education to associate degrees to bachelors to masters to Ph.D.’s. The more educated your prospect, the less likely they are to click on an advertisement. If you are selling to high school students, you should buy cpc ads. If you are selling to engineers or professors, you need to think more about SEO (search engine optimization), because that’s where the volume is.
3. Organic search results clicks convert at least as well as paid clicks. Marketing Sherpa’s Search Marketing Benchmark study of 3,217 marketers showed that organic clicks converted at an average of 4.2 percent v. 3.6 percent for paid.
4. Oftentimes searchers visit your site more than once before self-selecting into a form, whitepaper, etc. HubSpot tracks the data and notes that a decent portion of the leads they get are from people who have visited the site through multiple searches over multiple months. Organic search results campaigns have more latency.
5. Marketing Sherpa reports that in the b2b (business to business) environment, less than one-fourth of b2b buyers to look to paid listings in their first try at accessing information.
6. Many think of Google as a search company, but I think of them as a modern media conglomerate with an ultra-efficient mechanism for selling advertisements that work particularly well in the longtail. Like other media companies, Google benefits from efficient pricing of advertising. As more and more niche companies start to advertise on Google, their prices will become more efficient and their rates will become less and less attractive relative to other media outlets.
The benefits of buying CPC ads versus organic SEO:
1. It is fast. You can be up and running with paid ads the very same day you are inspired to move.
2. You can experiment cheaply. The good thing about advertising on Google is that you don’t have to create a huge budget for advertising, you can throw as little money as you want, experiment efficiently, get the ratios where you want, and then expand.
3. You can send the clicks to custom landing pages crafted for just the words you bought. (In theory, this should dramatically increase the conversion rates relative to organic search results that more often than not land on your home page, but the Marketing Sherpa numbers say otherwise.)
Halligan says, “There are big benefits to both, so I recommend doing both. To get maximum benefit, I recommend optimizing around some keywords for organic search results and buy other keywords.”
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