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Search Engine Placement - Paid vs. Organic

There are a few different approaches to gaining exposure with search engines.  Some people often ask how much it costs to achieve good placement.  The real question is do you want to spend money, time, or both.  If you understand the difference between paying for placement and earning your placement “organically” you will be better equipped to make such a decision.

What is Organic Placement?

Organic Placement, also known as “Natural” or “Free” placement, are the Search Engine results that appear in the area located below and to the left of the “Sponsored Results”. Organic placement is based off of your websites meta tags, content and quality linking. Once the search engine has looked at these factors in combination with each other (and hundreds of others), they place your website within their results pages at NO COST for the keywords they feel your website is most relevant for.

What is Paid Placement?

Most commonly known as PPC or “Pay-Per-Click”, paid placement consists of a system where the highest bid set per click for a given keyword receives the highest ranking in the Sponsored Results.  This means you pay the amount you bid each time someone clicks on your website link from that search engine. Users can achieve a top ranking on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN right away as opposed to waiting for months to rank well in the regular search engine results. With PPC, search engines don’t care how well written or informative your website is because you are PAYING for your website to be seen in their sponsored results. The Sponsored Results are located in the shaded box on top of and to the right of the organic results.

Is one route better than the other?

The first thing you want to remember is that you shouldn’t compare the two, nor neglect one or the other. Paid placement is the quickest and most effective way to get immediate attention and placement on the search engines, but Organic placement is bound to get you more visitors. Paying for placement while you’re waiting to be ranked naturally is a good idea, but although paid and organic may lead to the same destination, you want to consider the ease of the road and the travel expenses involved! Organic results are statistically more popular, used more often and are much more cost effective, however they also take FAR longer to achieve and require a long journey of content writing, quality linking, and general back-work to gain the trust and respect of the search engines.

What do you do once you have achieved the organic rankings you have been working toward?

Once you are ranking well organically, using a PPC campaign to provide an additional presence within the search engine results can boost your traffic and help to keep qualified visitors rolling in to your website. You need to make sure that the investments you are making into each marketing effort are equal though. If you are not investing as much time into making your site informative and resourceful as you are investing dollars into maintaining high placement in the sponsored results, you’re going to see your web stats decreasing while your PPC bills rise!

Try to remember that just because you’re paying for the visitor to view your website, it does not mean that they have to like it or are required to work with you. Even if you are paying for the traffic, you still need to be providing a content rich website with original information and a few calls to action that will help turn visitors into leads. Your website is just like an in-person meeting, you only get ONE CHANCE to make a first impression. Whether they found you via the Sponsored or the Organic results, your visitor still needs to have a reason to want to work with you, so be sure to have your website ready and rearing to go before paying for the world to see it!

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