The Difference Between Organic Search and Paid Search
The search engines represent two distinctive yet precious traffic sources to inbound marketers in the form of organic search and paid search. On the other hand, the methods for getting traffic from these two sources are known as ‘Search Engine Optimization’ (SEO) and ‘Search Engine Marketing’ (SEM).
What Is The Difference Between The Two?
There are various techniques of getting leads for your business to learn, but first, you need to familiarize yourself with the differences between organic and paid search to help you make an informed decision regarding your business.
Organic Search
‘Organic Search’ refers to the pure, unpaid, natural ranking that is determined by the search engine algorithms. You can easily optimize for this kind of search using various SEO practices. Organic Search results are a derivative of the pure nature and quality of content of a web page. Hence, it provides the webpage listings that are more closely related to the user’s query based on relevance. These types of results can also be referred to as ’natural’ search results.
For many individuals, organic search is widely viewed as the most valuable and most credible traffic source for various reasons.
Google often receives the highest amount of search traffic, and this makes them the most reliable and preferred platform for individuals looking to read or purchase something.
Besides, Google is particular about their rankings, and appearing in the first page of the search results is enough proof that your content is of the highest quality.
Paid Search
Paid search, on the other hand, allows companies to pay search engine platforms to have their website displayed at the top of the search engine results page whenever someone keys in specific keywords or phrases.
Therefore, the fee you pay simply results from the clicks or views of your ads. Paid search results are more or less the same as advertisements because the website owners have paid to have their web pages displayed for certain keywords.
Consequently, these listings are shown when someone keys in a search query containing specific keywords. Interestingly, you can always differentiate paid search results from organic ones. The search engine companies are required by law to label such paid search results as ‘sponsored’ or ‘advertisement’ to avoid tricking the masses into malicious induced buying.
Also, search engines will often highlight the paid listings by either putting them above the organic results or by simply distinguishing them using shaded borderlines and other visual clues.
What Is The Essence Of Knowing The Difference Between The Two Search Results?
Knowing the difference enables you to make an informed decision regarding the relevancy of your search results. For instance, the paid results may be more useful to a shopping searcher than to a researcher, given that they are akin to advertisements.
Most importantly, a strong marketing strategy acknowledges the role of both types of search results, and one will use the two techniques interchangeably to improve their search engine ranking.