The Key Differences Between Organic Search and Paid Search

Many digital marketers who cannot figure out whether to go for organic search or paid search to increase traffic flow to their websites and which will fit their broader marketing plan better and benefit your business more?

A closer look at the key differences between them and understanding their pros and cons will help you in making a better marketing decision for your business.

Organic Search

Organic searches are listings of web pages that the search engines’ algorithms throw up after matching the string of keywords.

The Pros

Credibility: When your website return in the organic results, it increases the site’s perceived credibility among your target audience. High search ranking imply a certain degree of industry leadership and authority.

Awareness: Visibility in search engines for your keywords, and on informational queries relating to your business, increase awareness about your brand by putting your business in front of potential customers.

Cost Savings: With no cost per click, traffic from organic search engine is free. Though developing visibility takes time and money, there is no charge for clicks. It proves to be cost effective in the long run than all other marketing tactics employed to drive relevant traffic to your website.

Improved Click Through Rate (CTR): A highly ranked organic listing will generate more clicks from users as more of them tend to click on organic results. This involves time and but is important for businesses with longer buying cycles.

The Cons

Time: Depending on the competitiveness of the keywords involved, it could take weeks, or even months to achieve higher rankings. Most new businesses cannot wait that long.

Resources: You need more resources to create responsive content and using effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics to achieve a high ranking.

Paid Search

Paid Search results are advertisements, where a business pays to have their ads displayed by the search engine. The ads come at the top of search engine results when users perform a search containing your keywords.

The Pros

Targeted Visibility: Paid search campaigns can be tailor-made to reach specific target audience. This is achieved by segmentation of your audience into income, age, educational level, marital status, and by geo-targeting etc.

Click Through Rates: Using brand-specific keywords will get you more CTR than organic results.

Time: Paid searches are put right at the top of the pages as soon as you pay for the ads. Unlike in organic results, longer time is not required to get a high-placed ranking on the first SERP.

The Cons

Cost: Paid search is called Pay Per Click (PPC). As the name suggests, this involves money where you pay for each click.

Momentariness: The ads will disappear as soon as you stop paying for them.

Distrust Issues: Many users don’t trust paid ads and often avoid them. They tend to trust organic searches more.

For new businesses, paid searches are better marketing tool to begin with. But a combination of Organic and PPC, when integrated efficiently, often yields the best results.