Organic Search Engine Results Vs. Paid For Search Engine Placement

I read this great article today on why Organic Search Engine Placement is better than Paid for Placement. I am not saying that you SHOULDN'T do paid for placement - only that I think Organic search engine placement is more effective and gives you more visiblity.

The author of the article, Lee Odden, did some research and here is what he found:

• iProspect did a study (pdf) on this in 2004 (scroll to page 16 and 17) “Across the 4 search engines - Google, Yahoo! MSN and AOL — 60.5% clicked on a natural (or “organic” or “algorithmic”) search result, while 39.5% clicked on a paid search advertisement.”
• A recent study by iProspect and Jupiter Research shows that 2/3 of users click on the first page of results.
• The Enquiro eyetracking study is always useful.
  A study by OneUpWeb (pdf): “…search users are up to 6X more likely to click on the first few organic results as they are to choose any of the paid (PPC) results.”
  Jupiter: ” Algorithmic listings in search indexes generate an estimated six of seven commercially natured search referrals”
  2007 Marketing Sherpa Search Marketing Benchmark Survey
  Chris Dohman pointed out this post from SEO Book citing data from Jupiter (5 out of 6 commercial purchases which originate from search originate from the free (or organic) side) and from Atlas on PPC stats.

You can read the full article here: http://www.toprankblog.com/2006/09/organic-versus-paid-search-results/

I would love to hear what you have to say!

Thanks,

Char

Real Estate Website Design, Real Estate Search Engine Optimization