Search engine marketing (SEM) usually involves two beloved methods, SEO (search engine optimization), and PPC (pay per click). SEO involves making your website “popular” or “worthwhile” by the search engine’s standards so that it appears sooner in search engine result pages (SERP). These types of search engine results are called “organic.”
The other kind, PPC, is paying to have your website and its link appear in highly visible areas of the SERP. It’s the billboard of the Internet, basically. These searches are known as “paid” or “advertised” results. The only trick to this kind of billboard is sorting out what kind of keywords target customers will use, and having the savoir-faire to know how much to bid for those keywords.
But which of these SEM methods yields more results? One search engine marketing firm sponsored a study to look at the behavior of online users when they are searching for various items.
Almost half did not even venture past the first page when looking through search engine results. They would stop when they found their desired object or if they conducted another search using other keywords. In another chart, we see that only 9% would continue their search after looking at 3 pages. If most are limiting their searches to fewer than 3 pages, then one must conclude that it is essential to land at the top of the heap.
The trend over the past few years is that online users are looking through fewer and fewer SERPs. The principal explanation for this is that search engines like Google are continually perfecting their formulas, and users understandably expect more from their searches. It would be prudent to assume that this trend will either plateau or continue to even fewer SERPs.
So does SEO or PPC get more clickthroughs? It has been pretty common knowledge that organic results are favored, but this study revealed some numbers with the search engines of Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL: 60.5% clicked on organic search engine results, while 39.5% opted for paid results.
You keep this in mind while you take a look at the following stats:
It is plain to see that PPC takes up the lion’s share of advertising money on the Internet. This is somewhat misleading, however, as one should note that SEO is considerably cheaper than PPC. Also, PPC and SEO campaigns are usually conducted concurrently because the combination tends to produce the best results. However, online advertising analysts like eMarketer are predicting that more money will be poured into SEO due to studies like these that suggest organic results are the real winners in search engine marketing.
But then have they seen this story that claims paid clickthroughs are more profitable? The only thing that’s certain is that we need more research and experience with search engine marketing before we can confidently declare a victor in the SEM wars.
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