SEO Today Article: Defending Organic Search
IAB and ComScore released the first major study on the effectiveness of sponsored search advertising. Not surprisingly, considering the study was sponsored by Overture and Google, the report was very favorable towards sponsored search, often at the expense of organic search.
My concern is that if you don’t look beyond the numbers presented in the ComScore/IAB Study, you would assume that organic search is a waste of time and budget. For reasons I’ll go into shortly, this is simply not the case.
We took the travel industry and identified 50 high traffic terms that a site like Expedia would want to be found for. The terms included phrases for hotels in major destinations such as New York and Las Vegas, as well as phrases used to find the best airfares. For these 50 phrases alone, we estimated over 2.8 million searches were launched last month. If you accept ComScore’s click through numbers, that would result in 456,000 visitors for paid search and 153,000 visitors for organic search.
We then found out what the going bid prices were for these terms on Google AdWords and Overture. The total cost for those 456,000 visitors would be well over half a million dollars, at an average cost per click of $1.18. We did some quick research on the leading search optimization services, ours included, to see what a typical rate charged would be to optimize for these 50 words. The rates ranged from $1000 per month to $10,000. Let’s go with the highest one (not ours, by the way) for a monthly cost of $10,000. Again, if we accept ComScore’s numbers, that would result in 153,000 visitors at an average cost per visitor of $0.07.
Let’s now apply ComScore’s conversion numbers. With paid search, you would have 3647 converted visitors at an average cost of $147.08 per converted visitor. With organic search you would have 611 converted visitors at a average cost of $16.37. Let’s run over those comparisons again:
Total Monthly Budget
$500,000 (Paid) vs $10,000 (Organic)
Average Cost per Visitor
$1.18 (Paid) vs $0.07 (Organic)
Average Cost per Converted Visitor
$147.08 (Paid) vs $16.37 (Organic)
Even given all of ComScore’s built in biases with the numbers involved, it still seems to me that organic search optimization is very much worth the time.
Bottom line
It’s not really surprising that the ComScore study came out solidly on the side of Paid search. It was commissioned by Paid Search providers, including Google, Overture and Sprinks. These companies make no money from organic search, but paid search pulls in billions yearly.
Also, I certainly know the value of paid search and recommend its use highly. It offers several advantages over organic search. One of the assumptions I made in this column was that a search optimization company would be able to achieve top rankings for some highly competitive terms. With paid search, if you’re willing to pay enough, you can get the rankings. Also, paid search gives you control over what the searcher sees. This is often not the case with organic search.
My point is that search marketing should not ignore one strategy and focus solely on the other, as is implied by the ComScore study
Search engine user studies have found that over 70 percent of users click on organic results rather than sponsored listings. In our own research, we’ve found that during the research phase of a buying decision, consumers show a strong preference for organic listings. Even when it comes to actually buying online, a significant percentage of searchers purposely avoid sponsored listings. By ignoring search engine optimization, you’re ignoring these customers.
Organic search optimization is a frustrating and tedious process and I can understand the temptation to say the heck with it and bid for the terms you want. But the fact is, by doing so, you’re saying no to a strategy that could literally save you hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, or even, as we saw in the previous example, a month. Remember, $1.18 a visitor vs $0.07. How could you say no to a deal like that?
.pdf file that presents the basic findings at
This month our featured report provides marketers and agencies with a better understanding of the marketing effectiveness and value of "Sponsored Listings" on Search Engines. The research provides marketers and their agencies with quantitative and qualitative data on how to prove:
The effectiveness of interactive marketing (both branding and direct response metrics).
The efficiency of interactive media (vs. other media channels)
The ROI for specific interactive marketing tactics.
In this report, the data will clearly show the value of sponsored listings in the online marketing mix by industry sub-category.
posted by Jen @ 9:06 AM
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