Organic Search Listings
Organic Search Listings: The natural free results that come up when you perform a keyword search in a search engine. Before the days of pay per click (PPC), organic search listings where your only option.
While paid ads and PPC can play an important part in your marketing strategy, ultimately it is the organic search results that will more likely yield the greater click-through rates when all other things are equal. As a result organic search listings will maximize the traffic to your site whenever you climb to the top.
Pros of Organic Search Listings:
Greater Trust Equals Greater Conversions
People trust organic search results more than they do sponsored results. Web searchers are used to search engines displaying the free search results with text descriptions of the listed website. Even though a paid ad is listed at the top, many consumers prefer the organic search results. This is because they don't necessarily trust a search listing that anyone can pay for to be relevant.
Most consumers are skeptical when they see a magazine ad, a commercial on TV, or a sponsored ad on a search engine. We all know those ads are commercially motivated and may not always be the most relevant product or solution for our needs. Think of all those sponsored eBay and Amazon listings that come up when you perform a search. The paid listing may simply be the result of the company with the deepest pockets being able to get their listing in front of you. Just because they are a big company does not necessarily mean they will provide the best match to your search. There is certainly not the same level of trust for PPC that we see from visitors arriving from organic search. Organic search can, of course, be commercially influenced. However, recent research shows that people tend to trust organic results compared to sponsored listings.
Trust and Credibility Go Together
Credibility is important for all your marketing efforts. Your customers want to see that you are a credible business with whom they can trust to do business. As stated above anyone can buy a sponsored listing even for services they may not necessarily provide. Therefore, web searchers will feel that a website found in an organic search will have greater credibility. They feel that the search engine would not list you unless you covered the topic they are searching for. Surfers will also feel you are a credible professional because you must be doing things right to be listed in the organic search.
Power of Branding
Your company brand is the most important aspect of your marketing efforts. This is why large corporations are investing resources into organic search to gain the marketing benefits of promoting their brand. For example, most consumers would expect to find Canon in a search for cameras. If your company does not show up for the keyword results in which you'd expect to appear, it can be embarrassing. Consumers may wonder if a company is as important as they once were if they don't even show up in MSN, Yahoo or Google. On the other hand, placing your brand in the top search results can confirm that your company is important. Therefore, small businesses can give the impression of big business importance by securing a better position in organic search than their larger competition.
Organic is Free
After all these years, it's still free to be listed in all the major search engines. Google, currently the most popular of the organic search engines, has stated that they will always provide free listing within their search results. However, some search engines, such as Yahoo, do have paid inclusion options. Paid inclusion simply guarantees your page will get indexed quickly and stay indexed for as long as you maintain your subscription, but it does not promise a particular ranking. Although, paid inclusion can be very useful in getting pages indexed or re-indexed quickly. This allows you to feed news and other time-sensitive content to the search engine as quickly as possible. However, if you have a website with good quality content and links from third party sites, site submissions are not necessary and you do not need paid inclusion.
Cons of Organic Search Listings:
Organic Rankings Require an Investment in Time
The saying, “Nothing worthwhile in life ever comes easily,” definitely applies to organic rankings. It takes time to research and choose the right keywords. You then need to take the time to optimize your website for those keywords. After all your hard work, you will then have to wait and see if the search engines will list you at the top. But your efforts don't end there. You must continually track and maintain your SEO efforts to make sure you remain at the top. Search engines continue to update their listings and ranking criteria while other websites continually update their SEO to get to the top. This means you need to continually make the proper changes to your website to stay on top of their changes. It can take up a good amount of your time just tracking your listings and trying to figure out what changes if any that you need to make. However, the keyword analysis and web log analysis reports provided by Sarno Photography & Graphic Design™ will greatly assist you in this endeavor.
Organic Rankings are Not Automatic
With organic listings, you cannot simply pay to be quickly listed in any ranking you desire. You have to wait and see how the search engines will list you as they see fit. If your site fails to appear in the first 30 listings of search results, your chances of people visiting your site are greatly diminished. Search engines do not reveal how they choose who is ranked at the top and who isn't. We are left to ask: How do I get to the top? Where do I start? That's why I am here to help with resources like this article, your Keyword Analysis Reports and Web Log Analysis Reports. These tools give us insight on how we can achieve top ranking. Achieving positions in organic search requires the proper techniques, skill, and knowledge of SEO. If Search engine optimization is not done properly or not maintained then you will never reach the top.
The key to success is to use ethical SEO practices to create web pages that are highly relevant to the keyword phrases that you choose. To do this, you simply need to tweak your web page's content while paying attention to off-page factors like the number and type of links coming to your page. If you optimize the pages of your site to the preferences of the major search engines you can then watch your rankings and traffic climb.
While optimizing your website to rank well for organic searches takes more effort than simply buying an ad, it can provide your business with one of the highest return on investment results that you're likely to find. Numerous studies have named search engine optimization one of the most effective forms of online marketing. Its relatively low cost, high relevancy and high conversion rates make it an ideal marketing tool for almost any business. However, as with any area of marketing, SEO is a competitive field.