Organic vs Paid Traffic
Posted Friday, October 9th, 2009 by Stefan
Paid results can be defined as those listings that require a fee for the search engine to list their link for particular keywords. The most effective and commonly used paid listing is Pay Per Click (PPC), where you pay each time someone clicks on the link in your advertisement. The price increases with the competitiveness of the keyword. Google Ad Words/Ad sense is one popular form of paid search advertisement. There are other affiliate marketing links which also fall in the PPC category.
Organic results can be defined as listings gathered by search engines’ web crawlers and ranked according to relevance to the search terms. The resultant relevance is calculated by criteria such as extent of keyword match and number of sites linking to that website. It is much more valuable to be listed highly in the organic results than in the PPC advertisements.
Benefits of organic vs. paid results
- No cost – Good news is that you don’t pay a “tax” per click in organic listings.
- Get more traffic – The organic naturally owing to its free nature of search, draws more traffic than paid search.
- Get visitors with a higher education – A stunning survey reveals that highly educated people have a tendency to click on organic results more often than paid one.
- Longer lasting rank and traffic – The ranking is properly maintained with search engines having your ranking history, helping you rank highly in the future, and they only reevaluate your rank every few weeks or months, allowing you to maintain your rank longer than normal tenure.
Comparing SEO and PPC
The content optimization for organic results and the pay-per-click advertising supply complementary benefits to users. Jerboa described a study at SEO-PR that revealed click-through rates tripled for a site positioned in top spots for both natural and paid listings.
“SEO can be the lowest cost form of traffic, while PPC is an excellent tool to round off natural SEO voids,” said Dave Williams. “Natural SEO positions can generate similar or greater traffic (and conversion) as PPC, while PPC helps to maximize share of voice and search impact.”
Paid inclusion is a middle ground: though there’s no guarantee of position, you can use it use it to reduce traffic costs on competitive keywords. Focus on conversion; track cost per lead, cost per visitor, and factor in cost per customer acquisition and their lifetime value to find out how to balance your tactics.
Conclusion:
The comparison between PPC and SEO, paid and organic clearly reveals that more people are attracted towards free organic results and it is a source of bringing money with minimum effort and to a wide range of users, which is obviously not in the case of paid results.






