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Organic Search

How Organic Search Can Help Your Company Part 1

Originally Published: June, 2004

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?

Organic Search Pros:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

Editor's Note: Both organic & PPC search campaigns require good keywords to be profitable, Word Tracker is the leading tool for finding profitable keywords. Click here for your FREE top 500 keyword report

Continued: Organic Search And How Can It Help Your Company Part 2 >>>

This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software.

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April 26 2024 14:05 UTC