Why Go Organic?
Research has shown time and time again that pay-per-click is not only expensive "" you could end up making a loss paying for each click, especially if people click just out of curiosity and weren't really interested in what you had to offer "" it is also very much the poor relation to organic SEO placings. People click mainly on the central part of the search results pages. They click on the natural listings, the organic listings. There's the feeling that those listings are there because of merit, because they deserve to be there, not because they paid to be there. And rightly so! Lots of people just will not click on the sponsored listings at all because they feel those listings are crashing the party they don't deserve to be at, simply by paying the man at the door. They paid to be there, but click on them and they could be any old rubbish. And they often are.
People trust the organic listings. They're the ones that are there naturally, according to the
scheme of things. People have a natural distrust of paid-for things. That's why we trust the TV
programs we watch, but then as soon as the commercial break begins we put up our defenses as the adverts invite our skepticism.
We can make the distinction further between advertising and editorial content. To continue the
metaphor of television, the program is the editorial content and the ads are "" obviously "" the advertising content. The distinction becomes blurred a little bit when considering that the subject matter of some TV programs "" including certain daytime "chat"? shows "" are largely driven by momentum from the PR industry. In the online world this distinction is not so blurred. After all, how we react to what is presented on a web page is a fairly simple thing to examine.
Studies have been done which have tried to identify, using more scientific methods, where people are most likely to click on page. Google has released its own "heat map"? of where it thinks people will be most likely to click, and this is shown below.
"A joint eye tracking study conducted by eye tracking firm Eyetools and search marketing firms
Enquiro and Did-it.com has shown that the vast majority of eye tracking activity during a search
happens in a triangle at the top of the search results page, indicating that the areas of maximum
interest create a "golden triangle.""? (PRWeb.)
The chart, reproduced below, shows clearly "" and in much greater detail than Google's diagram ""
how the eye tends to examine a page of search results. The graphical colour coded key on the
right of the diagram shows that most interest is shown by the orange colours, followed by the
yellows, with less interest being indicated by the greens and blues, while the darker colours draw
practically no interest at all.
What is extraordinary is the vast difference between the interest shown in the results near the top and left of the page and the interest shown in the right hand sponsored listings. This is the kind of thing people who manage PPC campaigns, and everyone else who advocates Pay Per Click generally, really hate to see. Hardly anyone bothers with the sponsored listing at all below the fold (where the user will begin to scroll down a page).
This is confirmation that most of the Pay Per Click ads are totally ignored. They are clearly considered worthless by most people. So unless you're going to bid the high prices for the top left position, if there is one (there's not even any guarantee that PPC ads will be in a top level at all, but, rather, stuck in the ignominious position down the right hand side) you'd better do a bit of work on getting your site the organic listings, because that's where all the eyeballs are going to be.
Those people who rely on the Pay Per Click way will do so at their financial peril. Their follow up
systems had better be really good if their ROI (return on investment) is going to justify the high price paid for every click. A certain proportion of those clicks are going to the fraudulent, and a good percentage are going to be from tyre-kickers who don't have any interest in buying what you have to sell anyway.
The unit markup had better be extremely good to make up for all of this.
However, for those of you who are smart enough to decide, from the word go, that the organic
listings section is the place to be, you will not have any of these worries.
So if most people put their trust in the organic listings why do search engines have Pay Per Click programs? Because they pay good money, of course. The natural search listings is what draw the big crowds, but they don't provide the search engines with any revenue whatsoever. But they do provide the traffic, and search engines know that they can monetize that traffic by having their sponsored advertising slots down the side of the page (and sometimes on the top, above the organic listings)
Of course, there's going to be a small minority of people who don't know the distinction between the two types of listings, and they will be the ones who click on the sponsored ads the most, I expect!
I should also, perhaps, mention the subject of click fraud. This is something the search engines
have been trying to eradicate, but it is quite difficult to prevent for a variety of reasons. From the point of view of the advertiser who has chosen the PPC route it can be devastating. The most common form is when a competitor clicks "" or gets other people to click "" on your ad for no reason other than because he knows it costs you money. You will pay for every click even though nothing more is happening; the clicker isn't interested in buying anything from you, just in giving you a headache.
So you can go down the PPC route if you wish, using programs like Google Adwords or the Yahoo equivalent (and there are many other variants on the same theme run by the smaller search engines and by other sites) but that isn't what this book is about. In showing you the pitfalls of PPC I'm trying to steer you in the direction of free traffic that you can get for yourself without paying anyone else and without paying for clicks.
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