Organic SEO has become the way to get a site to rank high in search. In fact, recent changes to both Google and Bing’s webmaster guidelines confirm this. Search engine metrics are dense. Although search engines publish their preferred methods of search optimization, not whole lot is actually known about their logistical inner workings. What those of us on the outside know is what the search engines tell us. This information is augmented through trial and error experimentation by various SEO companies.
What further complicate matters is search engines change their algorithms on a fairly regular basis. By-and-large, these are tiny changes but some are huge. Three big changes have occurred in the past two years. One such change happened in late 2011–Google’s “Panda”. The next was “Penguin” and the last was known as the EMD or “Exact Match Domain” update. As a result, the dynamics of using article directories and other methods of building links changed drastically. These algorithmic changes essentially shut down sites with poor Internet marketing SEO.
This gives rise to the old debate regarding PPC and organic optimization. We all know there are two types of SERP or Search Engine Results Page rankings: PPC and organic. The differences are not only in aesthetics, vertical appearance and price but in statistics.
Pay Per Click Drives
Everyone who has been on the web is quite familiar with populated search results. After a search has been executed, the top results are highlighted and appear with a small print disclaimer, alerting the user of the fact the first results are paid advertisements but not endorsements of the search engine.
Known as “PPC” or Pay Per Click, these results are the product of what film makers and television executives refer to as “product placement”. The advertiser is paying a premium to be at the top of Bing and Google’s search results. With that large scale exposure, one would certainly conclude there is a substantial ROI. But the truth of the matter is, organic search engine optimizationgenerally fares better. In fact, PPC might be better viewed as a loss-leader of sorts. Astoundingly, only 10 to 15 percent of click-through traffic is generated by PPC drives. Those stats certainly don’t deliver too much bang for the buck. Another way of measuring this poor performance is to put it in some perspective.
There are nearly 8 billion searches performed on Google each month in the United States alone, according to Tech Crunch. Of those, about 30 percent are redundant searches, meaning different users searching for the same items, like “iPad mini”. That leaves a hefty 70 percent. And that 70 percent are classified as “long tail”, meaning searches which are irregular keywords or search terms only performed a few times a month. Incredibly, Google has let it be known that one-fifth or 20 percent of those 7.5 billion searches are performed for the first time ever. That means a PPC drive must contain keywords for the most searched terms in the 30 percent of redundant queries and chances are this won’t be the case.
Organic SEO Campaigns
Organic results are appear as links under the PPC results but manage to generate far more traffic.
Why?
Because organic SEO campaigns differ as a result of natural search behavior. A well-visited site with quality content and a myriad of social shares and links outperform PPC. In fact, 75 to 80 percent of a site’s traffic comes directly from organic search results. And that’s a far cry from any pay per click campaign performance.
The reason for such a lopsided disparity is simply due to the human eye and mind. Plain and simple, organic results are just more trustworthy. Organic results gain this exceptional accreditation precisely because of their popularity. The moral of the story is PPC, no matter how inexpensive, simply doesn’t deliver like organic SEO. Better rank is best left to cultivating organic results through a SEO specialist. Moreover, once the PPC drive ends, there’s absolutely no postliminary effect. Organic SEO, however, remains and grows.
If you’d like to improve your organic search rank, then contact us. We can build a customized optimization strategy which will help increase your site’s visibility and get it more conversions.
