• Natural/Organic Search Results - The results that most users are looking for. When we talk about search engine ranking, these are the results we’re talking about. The order of these results is determined by how relevant each is to the searcher’s query. Important: You can’t pay a search engine to give you a high ranking in the natural results. You can only get a high ranking if your content is seen as relevant and important by the search engines.
• Paid Listings - Pure advertising. This is how the search engines make their money. Advertisers pay the search engines to display their ad whenever someone searches for a word that is related to their product or service. These ads look similar to the natural search results, but are normally labeled “Sponsored Links”, and normally take up a smaller portion of the window. The order of these results is determined mostly by how much each advertiser is prepared to pay.
Here is the sample:
The blue border represents the natural/organic search results and the red border represents the paid listings.
Which is more effective?
For most industries, the natural results are significantly more effective than paid listings:
- 89% of people click on the no.1 result, 33% on no.2, 17% on no.4, 17% on no.5, 6% on no.7 and 0% on no.8 (Microsoft Eye-Tracking Study of informational searches)
- 94% of people see the no.1 result, 94% see no.2 (Microsoft Eye-Tracking Study of informational searches)
- Only 50% see the no.1 paid listing (PPC/paid ads) and only 40% see the no.2 paid listing (Eye-tracking Study, Enquiro, Did-it and Eyetools, 2005)
- Organic results get clicked 8½ times as often as paid listings – excluding search results that have no paid ads (Enquisite 2008)
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