GoHuman Blog » Marketing Monday: Organic vs. Paid Listings

Marketing Monday: Organic vs. Paid Listings

If you are a new business trying to successfully market yourself on the internet, you already know the learning curve can be a bit intimidating. The terminology alone — SEO, SEM, Social Media, PPC, CPC, CPM, CTR, Search Marketing, Display Advertising, Quality Score, etc. — can make you want to throw your hands up in dismay. Especially when you’re already knee deep in the logistics of getting your business off the ground.

At this early stage, determining your target market, finding the most economical solution for your particular niche, and getting a return on your investment (ROI) through branding or paid search marketing all are important issues that must be addressed. Learning the terminology and lingo surrounding those issues will enable you to make the best decisions for your business.

As part of this Blog’s new Marketing Monday series, we’ll help you to begin this journey by defining the two main types of search advertising listings: organic (free) and paid (advertisements).

Organic listings are those search engine results that typically appear on the left side of a search page. These are “free” results, and are listed and sorted according to the search engine’s algorithms and related factors such as keywords, website links, and relevancy to the user query. For example, when you query the word “organic coffee” you will get a list of websites on the left-hand side that are relevant to organic coffee and you will ultimately find millions of websites from which to choose.

Paid listings (advertisements) are the search engine results which are noted by the phrases “Sponsored Links” or “Ads”. They typically appear to the right of the search engine results, but can also show up above or even below the organic listings. They are sorted according to a different set of criteria, algorithms, keywords, relevancy, and quality scores. In the same “organic coffee” query noted above, you will find about a dozen ads for organic coffee at the top of the search engine results above and also to the right of the organic listings.

rganic and paid listings appear in response to the same user query (in this case “organic coffee”), the results are independent of each other. This allows for websites that do not rank highly in the organic listing to rank at or near the top through paid searches. We’ll go into greater depth on this topic in future blog posts.

As a small business owner or entrepreneur, it pays to know what your choices are and if you’re reading this blog…CONGRATULATIONS! Because chances are, you’ve already taken advantage of GoHuman’s free search directory as a first step in marketing your business. And if you haven’t signed up yet, go to www.GoHuman.com and choose the level of service that you feel will benefit your business the most. We’re changing the way your world works!

Google-Quality-Score

This entry was posted by Wendy Englehardt on Monday, December 12th, 2011 at 6:20 PM

Filed under Business, Marketing. 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.

Tags: cpc, cpm, ctr, display advertising, online advertising, online marketing, organic listings, paid listings, ppc, quality score, search engine optimization, search marketing, sem, seo, small-business, sponsored links

Ron

Great post, Wendy
Anonymous

Wendy, thanks for explaining these distinctions to our end users. With all the choices and the importance of making the right one, small businesses need a trusted adviser in the area of marketing.
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