Why SEO Beats PPC Advertising: Most Search Engine Users Ignore PPC Ads
By Anna Johnson on March 24th, 2011User testing by User Centric indicates that most search engine users ignore paid search listings or pay-per-click (PPC) ads. That means Internet marketers are wise to renew their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts in order to increase their organic search rankings and capture the attention of search engine users.
An experiment by User Centric found that test subjects averaged 14.7 and 10.7 seconds looking at organic search results on Google and Bing, respectively. Only 28 percent spent even 1 second looking at paid ads on Google and only 21 percent spent a second looking at paid search ads on Bing. The rest ignored the PPC ads altogether.
None of this is to say that paid search advertising doesn’t work. Google wouldn’t be raking in so much money if that was the case! User Centric’s rather extreme findings do, however, underscore the relative importance of organic search results. Most people trust organic search results more than paid search results, it seems.
If so, search engine optimization (SEO) is more important than ever and Internet marketers are wise to renew efforts on SEO if they want to capture the most amount of search traffic.
Source: eMarketer, “Search Behavior Shines Spotlight on Organic Results,” eMarketer, March 9, 2011
