High natural search results… why even run paid search?

This question comes up a lot… if you are ranking well for a competitive or non competitive term, as in the first 3 positions in organic listings, let me congratulate you. That isn’t something easy to do - consider yourself lucky, smart, a combination of both, or thank whoever got you there.

If you are in the first three positions in organic for, let’s say the term, “buy dvds”, an obviously competitive field, wouldn’t you save money by just running your website without a PPC campaign? The answer is simply “yes” as you won’t be spending a dime every time someone clicked on your listing. It’s free - you’ve worked your way up the organic ladder and you’ve earned it! Chances are that you may be paying for SEO services to get this high on such a competitive term, or maybe you know what you’re doing.

Besides, its also said that over 70% of folks that search for a term will click on the organic listing anyways. So whats the point behind all of this? There are several points you should keep in mind when you decide not to run a PPC campaign:

1. losing out on more traffic
2. branding opportunities
3. visibility & reliability

The first reason is very simple; you’ll get more traffic. As stated above, 70% of the users will probably not click on sponsored links, but what about the remaining 30%? Why not give them an opportunity to visit your site? As your landing page is already optimized for that particular keyword (as you are on the top of the page in organic listings), your quality score will be very good assuming you have a properly written creative. On top of that, the user may see your first ad in the sponsored links section, but may look around at different results before choosing which link to click on. Perhaps after they see your paid link on top, and then your organic link, they’ll click on the organic link instead - essentially making your impression a “free online billboard”. Which leads me into the next point…

In my experiences with banner and display advertising, there is something called a “road block” which is essentially a complete site takeover. No, I am not talking about those really annoying ads that expand to the size of your monitor and you cant seem to find the “close” button - but websites where you might visit that have a 728×90, a 300×250, and a 468×60 - and all banners are displaying almost the same graphic and creative, but in different sizes. In my experiences, when you run 2 banners on a page instead of one, this will more likely lead into a click than running just one banner on the page. With an organic listing and a paid listing on the search engine results page, this can have the same effect. While studies of this concept is hard to prove that both the paid and natural search listing together provide synergy, I recommend it as it can be a good opportunity to promote your brand, your services, your products, whatever you can. It is definitely worth the extra cost that you might incur if a user does click on your PPC ad - and maybe your organic ad would have never been clicked on if it weren’t for the fact that they saw your PPC ad first! Better safe than sorry!

Finally - leading into my last point is visibility and reliability. Now that you have two listings on the search results page and more visibility - there is a chance that your user who clicks on the ad will notice your visibility and deem you more reliable. Perhaps that your website won’t increase traffic by a large amount, but there is a chance that conversions could increase a little bit. If you see a organic link for a site, such as “www.dvdempire.com” not accompanied by a paid link, or vise versa, it may be more tempting to just skip over it. However, what if you typed in “buy dvds” in Google and a paid listing appeared right before a natural listing? A user may see this as a more reliable source, maybe click-thru, maybe search the site, and maybe check out with $150 worth of DVDs just in time for the holidays.