Should you drop more money on paid search engine results or on organic SEO? The question definitely isn’t one versus the other, because it’s about a 60/40 split between those who find organic results more relevant and informative and those who find paid search results to be more relevant and informative.

While there are a few people out there who look at organic search results and probably don’t realize there’s a column of paid results on the page, and while there are a few people who wouldn’t know a Wikipedia entry if it came up and bit them, for the most part, people find both paid and organic search results interesting and relevant, with the slight edge going to organic search results.

The paid search results can drive short term traffic when well done, but if it is driving people to a site that’s not very good, then those ad dollars are not good investments. The site itself has to convince people to come back, and in order to do that, it needs to practice solid SEO practices and keep the content relevant, up to date, and interesting. Paid search results and SEO should both be a part of your website’s plan for growth, with SEO taking on a slight preference over paid results in your budget.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 8:56 am and is filed under Google, Paid Search, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.