There is an ongoing debate in search marketing about whether Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Optimization is more effective for driving traffic to company sites.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, involves getting links to web sites to rank higher in natural, or so-called organic search results on certain keywords. Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, involves buying paid search ads for specific keywords. Both are designed to catch users’ attention when they are searching, and prompt them to click through the ad or the link to a web site.

Through research, I have discovered that while articles that come up in organic listings get more clicks than do the paid listings on Google, individual business web sites receive more clicks from the paid listings than from the organic listings.

Confused?  SEO companies like to use the numbers to prove that SEO is the way to go.  However, they do this by not giving you all of the variables.  If you look at the whole picture, then you can find the truth in the numbers.

Commercial Searches

Let’s say you are in the market for a BMW car.  You go to Google and do a search for “new bmw 525i.” You would get results that look similar to this:

If you examine the paid listings (labeled “Sponsored Links” on the right and at the top), you will see that the paid listings list dealerships, price quotes, etc.  The organic listings show concept cars, BMW 5 series information and more.  So, in this search, which we call a “commercial search,” users tend to click on the paid listings.

Informational Searches

Now, let’s say you’re interested to learn more about a MySQL programming topic such as “mysql database table structure.” So you search Google for that phrase and get results that look like this:

Here you will not see any paid listings; instead, it’s all organic listings.  This is called an “informational search,” which happens more often than “commercial searches.”

The last few times you used a search engine, were you looking to buy something or find information?  If you answer that question, then you will understand the first part of my theory that organic listings receive more clicks than paid listings on search engines.

Applied to Business Needs

Let’s find out how individual businesses receive more clicks from the paid listings than from organic listings.  The number of clicks that go to paid listings versus organic listings ranges from 30% to 75%. They range based on the search engine used, but let’s stick with Google, where the numbers range from 30% to 35%.  Let’s be conservative and use 30%.  So, of all clicks that take place on Google, 30% are conducted on paid listings.

Since it is difficult to know the number of clicks performed on Google each month, let’s use one billion clicks per month for this example.

Now, I know what you are saying to yourself: 700 million clicks go to organic listings and 300 million clicks go to paid listings — that’s what the SEO advocates show you. But what they don’t show you is how many sites share those clicks. That’s a huge part of the equation.

To keep it simple, Google indexes billions of sites compared to a few hundred thousand customers, which means there is much more competition for organic searches than for paid searches. This means your business will receive more clicks on paid ads than on organic ones.

If your business sells something, you want to bring in customers who are conducting commercial searches.  So when an SEO firm says only 30% of the clicks that happen on Google go to paid customers, they are not looking at the full picture.

SEM Extends Beyond Search Engines

There is another very important variable to look at with regards to SEO and SEM; Google gets most of its traffic from sites other than Google!

Google puts its paid listings on sites such as PC Magazine, Wired, MLB.com, MySpace and YouTube. You can find more at https://adwords.google.com/select/afc/partners.html.

Now, imagine how many clicks are generated from just Google and your organic listings only benefit from that site. Meanwhile, SEM benefits from all of those top-ranked sites plus Google.  When you add that into the mix, you’ll understand why SEM customers have access to so many more clicks than SEO could ever access.

• adwords
• business
• google
• marketing
• sem
• seo