Why You Need Organic AND Paid Search Engine Listings
By Anna Johnson on July 7th, 2008Here’s the final insight from the research by Enquiro and MarketingSherpa that we’ve been discussing over the past few days.
Firstly, let’s recap the previously mentioned insights:
- Search engine searchers quickly scan or skim the results page;
- If a listing attracts their attention, they typically spend less than a second (0.7 seconds) reading it; and
- Almost no-one looks at the right side of the page.
Because of all this, there’s every chance that searchers will miss you if you only have one listing in the results.
Therefore… you need your listing to show up in more than one place on a results page!
Plus, according to MarketingSherpa, people differ as to how they read and click on search results. There are actually five different patterns searchers tend to use depending on where they are in the sales/educational cycle:
- The Quick Click
- The Linear Scan
- The Golden Triangle Scan
- The Deliberate Scan
- The Pickup Search
It follows then, that your search engine marketing (SEM) efforts should be focused on achieving multiple listings per page! Ideally, this means having more than one listing in the natural
results. But it also means running a cost-effective pay-per-click campaign.
While it’s tempting to think that you won’t need to run a pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign if you have high rankings in the organic search engine results, the aforementioned research indicates that you will LOSE potential leads if you don’t do both.
Or, looked at in reverse, by having a greater presence on any given search engine result page (SERP) you’ll have a better chance of capturing the attention of your typical 0.7 second search engine user!
