21/02/2014
Organic Search Conversion: Marketing's Little Secret
Most people involved in the search marketing world are often experts at tracking paid searches.
It makes sense: people who pay for advertising want to see a return on their initial investments. Something often overlooked by these same people are organic searches: listings on search engine results that appear because of their relevance to the search terms. With clicks generated by paid advertising already accounting for up 44% of a website's revenue (according to MarketLive's 2013 eCommerce report), the traffic brought on by organic searches is often disregarded.
What about organic searches? While many marketers are looking to paid Google ads to drive the most traffic, is the quantity and quality of organic search keywords worth obsessing over? I think so. The same eCommerce report also noted that, despite accounting for almost half of a website's revenue, the number of searches based on paid advertising was just one-third of total site traffic. That's two-thirds of site traffic grossly underutilized: a veritable gold mine of untapped revenue. It can be a tricky thing to research, write, and promote your product by yourself. However, the benefits for optimizing a website for organic search conversion may actually be marketing's little secret.
The assumption is since pay per click (PPC) marketing requires you to pay them for advertising, it should automatically generate more views. The opposite is quite true, according to conductor.com, which found out that organic search promotions convert at two times the rate of paid search. In fact, studies are beginning to indicate that the trust level for organic results is much higher than that of paid results and that 66% of users actually distrusted paid ads. In every online marketer's quest for more views and more sales, wouldn't it make more sense to go for the option that people put their faith in? It's the difference between McDonald’s and an untested new restaurant: the familiarity and trust people have in McDonald’s food quality means more people willing to eat there as opposed to a restaurant they’ve never heard of.
This brings up another topic that goes hand and hand with sales: return on investments (ROI). Despite generating a higher number of conversions, most PPCs have a generally lower ROI when factoring in the initial investment for advertising into the equation. For most cash-strapped small businesses and entrepreneurs, that investment could be a risk not worth rolling the dice for. It is also likely that creating the PPC ad campaign inflicts additional costs for time and labor (since there is quite a bit of work involved in getting a good PPC ad campaign working right). A great article on socialmediatoday illustrates the perils of putting too much faith on PPC advertising. It shows how, even with a lower conversion rate, organic search yields a much higher ROI as opposed to PPC advertising.
Another thing that organic search conversion has working for it is its evergreen presence: content that continues to drive traffic and social signals to a website long after its publication. PPC, because it is paid advertising, does not have this advantage; once the money stops, so does the displaying. Not only is the ROI much higher for organic searches; it also boosts revenue by trickling in additional sales long after the post is “hot“.
Toe to toe, it's easy to see that organic search more than holds its own against the might of PPC. Despite PPC's advantages in some situations, organic search is not going the way of the dinosaurs anytime soon. By wising up and investing to optimizing for organic search conversion, you'll be one step closer to unlocking marketing's little secret.
