Online Marketing Article

Natural, Organic Search Engine Results Vs. Pay Per Click Advertising

A search engine spider spends night and day searching the web for sites to include in its index.   

When a visitor searches for a term or keyword phrase the program looks in their index and, based on their own criteria, displays the results ranked by what it considers the highest level of usefulness, relevancy and (in the case of Google) popularity.  These are the “Natural” or “Organic” listings.   

A search engine query often comes up with thousands or even millions of ranked results.  For instance, if you look up “Los Angeles Real Estate” in Google you will see at the top right it says “Results 1-10 of about 25,400,000 for Los Angeles Real Estate”.   These results are displayed in the middle of the page. 

At the very top, the bottom and the sides of the page are the Pay Per Click results.  To be listed in these results the site owner pays a specified amount for each click-through received.  Pay Per Click is straight ahead advertising similar to the use of yellow page directories or magazine advertising.  One of the big advantages of Pay Per Click over these other forms of advertising is that your ad appears in front of the potential client or customer at the exact moment her or she is looking for you.  The second advantage is that you only pay when a visitor actually goes to your web site. 

The question business owners or in-house marketing directors often have is “Which is more important to overall search engine success, Pay Per Click advertising or Search Engine Optimization?” 

According to most search engine marketing experts you need both.  On one hand SEO requires a great deal of patience while your results and rankings build slowly and there is no guarantee what your particular results will be.  On the other hand while the results of a Pay Per Click campaign show up almost immediately the costs for many search terms has sky-rocketed over the last couple of years.     

The best bet is to divide your search engine marketing budget between the two.  This way you can get the immediate results of a quality Pay Per Click campaign while at the same time working toward a high ranking for important terms in the Natural Listings and the potential of plenty of free traffic.