Aug
6

Organic Search vs Paid Search

When you do any marketing, you have to decide when and where to spend money and what type of marketing you’ll do for free (or maybe you only want to do one of those). Two of the areas of internet marketing that can yield good results is in Organic and Paid Search.

Organic Search is that which Google, Yahoo, MSN, & other search engines show you when you perform a search. For example, if you do a search for “Dog House” using Google’s search engine, you see a list of results in the left hand side which are not in the “sponsored links” area. These results are considered Organic Search because they are not paying Google for the search and show up based on criteria that search engine spiders look for in order to rank the page based on the keyword – in this case it’s “Dog House”.

Paid Search also shows up when you do a search in Google for “Dog House” but the results are based on how much an advertiser is willing to pay to show up as a search result. In the right hand side of the page and above the Organic Search results you’ll see some sites listed. These sites are paying Google to show up there but do not necessarily meet your searched terms.

The difference here is that you, as an advertiser/marketer, would rather show in Organic Searches as you don’t pay for each search, clicks, or impressions. You could have 2,000 clicks on your website and never have to pay a dime for those clicks from the Organic Search results but if you had 2,000 clicks and using Paid Search, that would be a very different story…and likely paying a few thousand dollars.

Here’s the challenge – showing up first in Google, Yahoo, and MSN within the Organic Search results for your most relative keywords. If you can do that, you’re on the right path and will save tons of cash. To do so you’ll need to know the many important ways of implementing SEO into your website. No, it’s not impossible but can take some time to do it right and includes copy writing that is targeted to your keywords.

August 6, 2008   //   Advertising, Training   //   2 Comments   //  
  • http://www.pocketpreneur.com Carlo

    Hi Matt,

    The problem with strictly relying on showing up for organic SERPs is that your site is at the mercy of Google and other search engines.

    Imagine the poor guys who spent hundreds, even thousands, of dollars getting links in link farm websites before Google decided that paid links are bad.

    Or the guys that spent hundreds of hours building their links by commenting on blogs before Google decided to implement the nofollow attribute.

    Not to say that focusing on SEO is bad; just that one needs to rely on more than one source of traffic instead of putting all their eggs in Google’s basket.

    Cool post :)

  • MattKoshko

    Yes, I agree with what you’re saying. Putting all your weight on Organic listings is of course dangerous if you’re marketing full-time – don’t get me wrong.

    Thanks for putting in your 2 cents – I DO agree with you.