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What is "organic" search and how can it help your company?
The first time I heard the term "organic search" I immediately thought
of organic food at the grocery store. So, is this organic search
healthier for me? Will it reduce my chances of getting cancer? Not only
can the search engines bring most of the world's knowledge to my desktop,
but now they can prevent deadly diseases too! Imagine my disappointment
when I learned organic search was simply the next new buzzword for the
concept of pure, or crawler-based search. As some of our readers may
find it challenging to keep up with all of the latest lingo, I thought
I'd take a moment to at least explain the concept of organic search.
Organic describes a search that returns results by indexing
pages based on content and keyword relevancy. This is in
contrast to listings ranked based on who paid the most money
to appear at the top such as those on Overture.com.
Sometimes this is called "pure" or "natural search" as it is
supposed to be "untainted" by commercial payments or bids.
Historically, Google has led the way in championing the
virtues of natural or organic search. Its primary focus has
always been to return fast, highly relevant results based on
the content of the page, the relevancy of links pointing to
that page, and other "objective" criteria. Sponsored
listings have always been clearly separated from the organic
search results on Google. However, many other engines have
experimented with mixing the two types of search without
clearly labeling which is which. This has been followed by
public outcries, and at least one cautionary set of
statements issued by the FTC in 2002.
Pros and Cons
of Organic Search vs Paid Search
Unlike organic foods at your local
grocery store, you aren't required to pay extra to reap the
healthy benefits of "organic" search. So what are the
benefits of organic over paid search?
Pros:
-
Greater Click-throughs: People trust "organically
grown" search results more than they do sponsored results.
While the engines business is supported by paid ads, many
consumers prefer the organic search results. Due to the
contextual nature of organic search, the listings can be
more relevant and offer a greater depth of choices.
Therefore, while paid ads can play an important part in
your marketing strategy, ultimately it is the organic
search results that will more likely yield the greater
click-through rates when all other things are equal.
Therefore, it's this type of listing that will maximize
the traffic to your site whenever you climb to the top.
-
Power of Branding: More and more large corporations
are investing resources into organic search to gain the
marketing benefits of promoting their brand. For example,
most consumers would expect to find Dell.com in a search
for computers. If your company does not show up for the
keyword results in which you'd expect to appear it can be
embarrassing. Consumers may wonder if Company X is as
important as they once were if they don't even show up in
MSN, Yahoo or Google. Conversely, inserting your brand in
the top search results can give the impression that your
company is important. Therefore, smaller companies can
give the impression of big business importance by securing
aa better position in organic search than their larger
rivals.
-
Greater Trust Equals Greater Conversions: Most adults
learn to apply a healthy dose of skepticism when they see
a commercial on TV, a banner ad on the Web, or a sponsored
ad on a search engine. After all, we know those ads are
commercially motivated and may not always be the most
relevant product or solution for our needs. It may simply
represent the company that was able to spend the most
money to get their message in front of me. Sometimes
bigger companies do offer the best products, but there's
no guarantee. There's certainly not the same level of
trust that we see from visitors arriving from organic
search. Organic search can, of course, be commercially
influenced. However, a recent survey shows that people
tend to trust organic results compared to sponsored
listings. On the whole, you should see more visitors from
organic search converting to sales, assuming your rankings
were for targeted, relevant keywords. In the business
world, ROI, or Return On Investment, is king. Fortunately,
organic search can give you the high ROI you're looking
for or your boss is demanding.
-
Organic is Free: After all these years, it's still
free to submit to Google, arguably the most popular of the
organic search engines right now. Google has always been
adamant about not charging for inclusion in its index of
4.2 billion pages. Most other organic engines will also
index you for free, although some like Yahoo do have paid
inclusion options. Paid inclusion simply guarantees your
page will get indexed quickly and stay indexed for as long
as you maintain your subscription, but does not promise a
particular ranking. However, if you have a Web site with
good quality content and links from third party sites,
paid inclusion is "nice-to-have". It can be very useful in
getting pages indexed or re-indexed quickly. This allows
you to quickly test various page designs and to feed news
and other time-sensitive content to the search engine as
quickly as possible.
Cons:
-
Organic Rankings are Not Automatic:
With organic listings, you cannot simply hand over a certain amount of
money and be guaranteed to quickly and automatically achieve any
ranking you desire. Instead, achieving positions in organic search
requires the proper technology, skill, and know-how. There has always
been a cloud of mystery around the process of achieving top rankings.
How's it done? Where do I start? That's why resources like this
newsletter and products like WebPosition Gold are essential to a
business's success in search engine marketing.
-
Organic Rankings Require an Investment in Time:
The age-old adage of "nothing worthwhile in life ever
comes easy" rings true with organic rankings. While they
are monetarily free, simply submitting your pages to the
search engines is not enough to bring in a flood of new
visitors to your Web site. Far too many businesses have
been fooled into spending $49 or $99 to submit their site
to "thousands" of sites, 99% of which are obscure names
you've probably never heard of. The key is that someone
doing a search on a major search engine must be able to
easily find your Web site.
If your site is buried at the bottom of the list, or
simply fails to appear in the first few pages of search
results, you can kiss your chances of being found good-bye.
The key is to use responsible best practices to create
pages that are highly relevant to the keywords that
apply to your Web site and the products or solutions you
have to offer. . In other words, optimize your pages for
search engine visibility and see how fast your position
improves. To do this, you simply need to know what each
search engine needs for maximum visibility. Then tweak
your Web page's content while paying attention to off-page
factors like the number and type of links coming to your
page. Tune the pages of your site to the preferences of
the major search engines and then watch your rankings
and traffic climb.
While optimizing your Web site to rank
well for organic searches takes more effort than simply
buying an ad, it can provide your business with one of the
highest ROI results that you're likely to find.
Numerous studies have placed search engine optimization
at the top of the list of the most effective forms of online
marketing. Its low cost, high relevancy, and high conversion
rates make it an ideal marketing vehicle for almost any
business.
The catch? As with any area of marketing, SEO is a
competitive field. Arming yourself with the best technology and
knowledge is key to gaining a competitive advantage. Long-time readers
of MarketPosition know that WebPosition was the first product on the
market to track a Web site's rankings on the search engines and to help
improve those rankings. That early lead has given WebPosition more time
for its technology to grow and mature than any of its competition.
WebPosition's Page Critic module contains a wealth of advice and
statistics designed to move your site to the top of the organic search
results. Not only that, it also tracks your rankings and gives you
advice on how to achieve the best results in both organic and pay-per-click
search engines as well. Therefore, you can capitalize on the best of
both worlds.
This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from
WebTrends, the makers of
WebPosition. WebPosition helped define the SEO industry by being the
first product to track your rankings on the major search engines and to
help you improve those rankings. A free
free trial of
WebPosition 3.5 is available from WebTrends.
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