Paid Search vs Organic Search: What’s The Difference?
When you look at a search engine results page, there are two types of search engine results: paid search results and organic search results. Paid search results typically sit at the top of the search engine results page (tagged with the word ‘sponsored’), while organic search results can be found below.
Businesses can benefit from both types of search results. This post delves more into the difference between paid and organic search results.
Paid search
By using platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads, it’s possible to pay to position your web page listing at the top of the search engine results page. This allows you to immediately increase invisibility and get more visitors.
Both advertising platforms use a PPC (Pay Per Click) model. Your web page listing displays as an advert for a set period of time and you then pay based on how many clicks you get. You get to decide which search terms that will trigger your advert to appear. Using a PPC agency, you can target the right keywords.
While paid search can have immediate effects, your advert only displays for a short period of time. If you want to continuously appear at the top of the search engine results page, you’ll need to keep running ads every week. The cost of this could add up over time.
Organic search
Organic search results are decided via search engine algorithms. Search engines deploy billions of search engine crawler bots to regularly analyze every web page on the internet. A web page’s rankings are then determined based on how well the page meets various criteria.
The most important criteria that affects organic rankings includes use of keywords, use of hyperlinks, page loading speed, average traffic, number of backlinks, content quality, site security and mobile friendliness. It is possible to design and tweak web pages to meet these criteria. This is known as SEO (search engine optimization). Because SEO is such an elaborate and extensive process, it is often best to hire an SEO agency to take care of this.
Therefore, you can pay to improve your organic search engine results. However, there is less certainty that you will be able to reach the top of the search engine results page and it can take time to improve your rankings (sometimes months or years!).
The benefit of obtaining good organic search results over paid search results is that they encourage more trust. Many search engine users will skip right past the paid search results and only focus on the organic search results, because they know that these web pages have had to meet strict criteria in order to rank so highly. Maintaining high organic search results also doesn’t require constantly paying for ad campaigns – once you’ve achieved high organic search results, you can stop investing in SEO and your web page will likely still rank highly for several weeks or months afterwards. That said, it’s recommended that you do invest in SEO on an ongoing basis to maintain better rankings than competitors.
Conclusion
Paid search gets immediate results with a level of certainty that you cannot get from SEO. However, you have to keep spending money for your search listing to display as an advert, and some search engine users will ignore your advert and focus solely on the organic search results. Therefore it’s beneficial to invest in paid search results and encourage organic search results for the most successful outcome.
