Organic Search vs Paid Search

Organic Search vs Paid Search



Organic search traffic refers to the people who find your website link on the search engine results page. In order to maximize organic traffic, companies use Search Engine Optimization on their websites.



Paid search traffic refers to those people who click on your business’ advertisements or sponsored listings and reach the website. Companies need to pay a certain amount of money to get their listings on top of the search results.

81% of Internet users perform all kinds of searches on Google, while only 19% utilize other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, etc. So you should obviously focus on the former for maximum benefits. 

Google acts as a source for both organic as well as paid search traffic. The method for organic traffic is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the one for paid traffic is known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM).



SEO is the process of increasing the visibility of a website and adding to the quality and quantity of inbound traffic from the users of a search engine. On the other hand, SEM refers to the process of increasing a website’s visibility by promoting it on search engines with paid ads.



Now, let’s look at the differences between organic and paid search.



Organic Search



Whenever an Internet user enters a search in Google or other search engines, a list of results is displayed on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). These results are known as “organic results”. Google displays the results purely on the basis of the quality and content of the page. The people who visit your website by clicking on it in the results contribute to “organic traffic”.



Organic traffic is the most valuable traffic. Here’s why:



● People trust Google about everything. Be it some information they are looking for, or a product or service they need. Also, the most amount of traffic is directed by Google.

● Google pays a lot of attention to different websites and their rankings. It keeps updating the ranks depending on the quality of content.

● Getting a top rank is a time-consuming process and takes a lot of patience, but once your website reaches the top, it will enjoy several advantages for a long time.

● Google’s first results page shows ten results. These top 10 websites get 92% of the traffic on the search engine. For those websites that appear on the second page, the traffic goes down by 95%.

● As for the top organic result, 33% of searchers prefer visiting that one.



Although getting organic traffic requires a lot of persistence and patience, it is always worth the effort. According to 57% of digital marketers, a good SEO strategy is the most beneficial for lead generation. People trust Google so much that studies have shown that there are 10.3 billion Google searches every month.



Paid Search



The websites that appear at the top of all search results without any organic optimization are known as “paid search” results. There is a small icon that says “Ad” besides these results. Companies need to pay a certain amount to the search engine to have their websites appear on top.



As more and more businesses have started utilizing SEO for organic traffic, paid traffic has become more popular than before. With this service, you don’t have to wait for SEO to work well and reach the top. Your website is automatically displayed above all the results.



Google AdWords provides a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) service for paid search. Businesses that avail PPC have to pay a certain amount to Google every time someone clicks on their website link. AdWords is the most used program used for advertising today. 70% of Google’s revenue comes from AdWords. You can easily understand how effective it is.

You need to apply proper strategies while publishing your first advertisement on Google AdWords. If you do it right, you will get a huge amount of traffic much earlier than through an organic strategy.

Conclusion



Earlier, people used to avoid paid search since they considered it to be an outbound marketing strategy. However, since the advent of social media ads and tools, paid search has become more common than before.



In organic search, it takes at least three to six months for a business to start seeing results and some of them do not want to wait so long. With paid search, the results are seen immediately, because your site immediately reaches the top of the results.



Therefore, while considering which search to use for your business, you need to think about all the aspects and take the help of your team to better understand which way you should go.



For immediate results, choose paid search, but for efficient and cost-effective results, go for organic search. However, if you use paid search in the best way and apply the right kind of strategies, it can also prove to be very cost-effective.



So it really depends on your requirements and tactics that you are willing to apply. Think carefully and then decide on which way you want to go.