Best Practices for Search Engine Marketing

 

Organic Optimization Benefits Pay Per Click Campaigns

A study has found that organic search engine results can play a direct role in whether or not a paid listing is clicked. Basically, if this research is correct, your business should have both a Pay Per Click result and an organic result appear at the same time because a business will have a better chance of its paid result getting clicked than if the organic result had not appeared.

Professors Anindya Ghose and Sha Yang have highlighted the following findings:

·        On average, the impact of organic listings on paid advertising is 3.5 times stronger than vice-versa, possibly because of the tendency of consumers to trust organic listings more than paid ads.

·        The positive association between paid and organic listings increases advertiser’s profits by at least 6.15% when compared to profits in the absence of either of them. The positive association is strongest when advertiser-specific keywords are used and weakest when brand-specific and generic keywords are used.

·        Click-through rates, conversion rates and total revenues are higher when both paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when paid search ads are absent.

·        The combined click-through rates are 5.1% higher when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when only the organic listings are present.

·        The combined conversion rate increases 11.7% when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when organic listings alone are present.

·         Paid search advertising drives up to 54% of total revenue growth.

The professors used "a unique panel dataset of consumer responses to keyword ads on Google" to conduct their research. The complete findings from the study are evidently available in a paper entitled "Analyzing the Relationship between Organic and Sponsored Search Advertising: Positive, Negative or Zero Interdependence?" It's 52 pages long.

The larger point is that it pays to optimize your site for organic listings as this will increase organic positions as well as increase QUALITY SCORES, which will lower costs and increase positions for the paid listings.  So based on the data and the facts presented, if companies want to maximize sales, they should utilize both Pay Per Click Campaigns and Search Engine Optimization Programs.