Organic Search Results vs. Paid Search Results

Organic Search Results

Organic search results deal with the content of your site and where it shows up naturally on a search page. When you run a search on Google, you’ll sometimes notice a yellow box with websites at the top. Those are paid search results, someone is paying to have those links show up there. We’ll get to that in a minute.

Achieving high organic search rankings are going to come from a number of factors. A few of which include:

  • Page titles, descriptions and keywords
  • The coding of your site (don’t worry, we take care of that one and make sure it’s done properly)
  • The content on your site
  • How long your site has been online
  • Frequency of new content
  • Incoming Links
  • And much, much more!

Essentially, Google wants to know your site IS who it says it is. It wants to know that it’s a current site, which is why Google loves new content. Just putting your site up and leaving it out there won’t help you rank higher. It needs to be maintained, relevant content added, and more.

Paid Search Results (CPC)

If you’ve heard the term CPC, it stands for cost-per-click. Essentially, those ads you see highlighted at the top of a search results page, or in the right hand column are paying to be there based on the term you searched. The most popular means of which is launching a CPC or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign. You bid a dollar amount that you’re willing to pay for each person who clicks on your link. So even though when you search you SEE those links, the company sponsoring the link doesn’t pay anything until you actually click on it.

In it’s simplest form, the way it works is that you say, “I’ll pay 50¢ per click.” If user A bids 75¢/click, they’ll obviously show up higher. If user B bids 35¢/click, they’d show up lower.

However, it’s not quite as simple as that. Google assigns your website a page ranking, usually between 1-10, based on your organic search ranking. This means, the better your site is coded and configured organically, the less you have to pay to show up higher. Again, remember, Google wants real content, from real sites that are continually being updated.

So, not exactly this formula, but essentially Google will take your bid, multiplied by your site rating to determine it’s placement. So let’s take the same scenario above only add in a page ranking. You bid 50¢/click, and let’s say your page ranking is 4. User A bids 75¢/click but only has a page ranking of 2.

Your “weight”/influence would be: 50¢ * 4 = 200
User A’s “weight”/influence would be: 75¢ * 2 = 150

So now, you’re paying less money and coming in higher because your site is coded properly, has a good set of titles, descriptions and relevant keywords and anything else that contributes to stronger organic search ratings. You can see how it all starts to work together to your advantage!

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