Paid vs. Organic Search

Paid search has been very popular among many businesses as an inexpensive and effective way to market their products. For a long time companies have been using television, magazines and newspapers to market their products. The biggest issue with those mediums of marketing was that companies were paying to advertise their products to those whom they were not targeting. The other issue was that the companies were not getting valuable data such as who is watching/reading their advertisements, user reviews etc. In engineering terms, there was no feedback cycle for companies through conventional ways of marketing. Paid search has opened doors for small businesses and made it possible for them to reach consumers beyond their local reach. Based on information provided on wordstream blog, businesses make an average of $2 for every $1 they spend on AdWord. Please click this link to see some stats and success stories.

Now the biggest question is whether organic search is better or paid search?

Organic search is free. In organic search, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing direct your search to the website links for free based on the match between keywords and the content in the website. It is also called search engine optimization (SEO). In SEO, marketers have to put more effort in designing their websites content in such a way that it appears in result for relevant searches. So even though one is not paying directly to Google, he/she is spending more time and money on optimizing website. Getting listed among the top organic search results draws lots of traffic as many people consider it more credible compared to paid advertisement. The downside is that it takes longer to get to the relevant content and if the search engine algorithm gets upgraded then the ranking could drop and all the time and money spent behind website design goes to waste.

Paid search requires companies to set keywords, which when used in the search directs users to the advertising link. Advertisers only pay when users click on the link and visit the content. Paid search is very useful when marketers are trying to target specific audience, geography, season etc. Organic search is not effective to narrow the audience. Contextual search option is available in paid search. In general paid search provides better control over organic search.

In the end, whether to use organic or paid search depends on need.  It makes more sense for the companies with specific target market to use paid search. 

Sources:

http://www.brand5.com/organic-vs-paid-search

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/233159#