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Recently, I have been getting many questions about organic search engine results versus pay for placement search engine results questions. Business owners want to know what they are, what the difference is between the two and how these organic and non-organic search engine results can affect their business.
You will not find organic search engine results at the NaturalFoodsDepot, next to organic strawberries and free-range game hens. Organic search engine results are the ones people see when they type in a query into search engines. You don’t pay search engines to be a part of these results. Instead, to get those results for your business, you have to do search engine optimization.
The other types of search engine results are pay for placement ones.They work just like you would expect - for a fee, search engines will display them in the ad section of SERPs (search engine results pages). The advantage of the pay-per-placement model is you don’t have to optimize your web site, wait for it to be indexed and guess whether your web site will be highly ranked. Instead the best placement goes to the highest bidder.
The downside of paying to be included in the pay for placement results is two-fold. One is that you pay per click, not per sale. You pay to get a visitor to your web site, even though you don’t know whether this visitor is going to actually buy anything from your web site. The other issue is that some consumers simply ignore paid results. Just like some people ignore ads on TV, people train themselves to avoid looking at online ads.
So how can you, a business owner and expert, leverage both organic and pay for placement results to get more business? Should you stick to organic search engine results, or should you use pay for placement ones as well? I recommend using both. While some people ignore pay for placement results, there are many others who WILL use them when searching for information and products to buy. Let’s see how you can take advantage of both organic and pay for placement search for your business:
- Try pay for placement search engine results – learn about using pay per click search engines. Google AdWords and Overture are two of the many companies who provide this service. Since with these search engines you have to pay for every click, be careful. Set you daily budget, set your maximum cost per click and watch your campaigns. Compare different campaigns with different keywords and landing pages against each other.
- Compare your return on investment for search engine optimization versus your pay per click campaigns. Then you can easily figure out whether organic search results or pay for placement search results (or perhaps a combination of the two) are better for your business.
Diversifying your customer sources is the best way to insulate yourself from drastic changes in the online marketing landscape. Search engine results are like ice-cream: don’t settle for just vanilla or just strawberry – try one of each (bonus points for using the organic versions).
- Do Search Engines Hate Your Web Site?
- Holistic Search Engine Optimization