Paid Search, Organic Search: What’s The Difference?

Writing by Brick Marketing on Sunday, 5 of October , 2008 at 6:34 am

Due to the extraordinary growth of the Internet in the last year, I thought it might be appropriate to get back to the basics. Many people think that companies they see at the top of the search engines get their by paying for the privilege. But I’d like to dispel that myth. No one pays to be at the top of organic search results.

What Is Organic Search?
When you go to any search engine (Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live, Ask.com, or another) and type in a word or phrase then click “Search”, you are performing an organic search. This is what millions of people do every day. Every time someone searches Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live, or one of thousands of other search engines, they are performing an organic search.

Organic search results are those results that return information for specific searches. Companies achieve those rankings either by accident or because they understand how search works well enough to put together a strategy that gives them an edge in the ranking wars. This is called SEO - search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization is the process of testing different elements of web design and copywriting - on page and off page - to determine what works best for giving a web page high page rankings in the search engines. By knowing which factors search engines give more weight to, webmasters can influence their own search rankings just by adding or taking away certain elements from their web pages. If you can tweak your pages well enough to land on the first page of any of the search engines then you have successfully optimized a web page. Get that page in the top 3 positions and you have done very well. That is organic search. If you do it yourself it costs you nothing but time.

What Is Paid Search?
Paid search is the act of paying a search engine for a listing. The listing can either be at the top of the page, above the organic listings, or on the side - usually the right side of the search results page. You will see the phrase “Sponsored Links” or something similar. Those are paid search results and companies do pay to have their listings there. But how much?

That depends. Everyone who has a paid search results bids on keywords. You’ve noticed that the ads appear when you type in a word or phrase in the search box. Those words and phrases are the words and phrases that paid search advertisers bid on. The top listing is owned by the company who has the highest bid or the lowest quality score. When you strive to achieve higher paid search listings you should pay attention to your landing page’s optimization quality as well as your ad’s copywriting quality and relevance to the landing page.

Well, that’s about it in a nutshell. You pay per click for paid search listings and get organic search listings free.

                      Category: PPC Bidding Strategies, PPC Launch, PPC Management, PPC Opportunities, Search Marketing