While PPC costs rise, there is also a trend that no doubt disturbs the engines that offer PPC programs. Sixty-six percent of consumers “distrust” paid search ads.[3] Up to 85% of searchers say they “tend to ignore the paid listings”[4], while 87% of commercial clicks take place “on the natural (not sponsored) search results.”[5] Three times as many marketers who outsource the management of their natural SEO to search engine marketing firms and who also participate in pay per click advertising recognize a higher ROI from their search engine marketing services than from PPC.[6] These facts, coupled with the fact that Google has recently announced that it will begin to take the relevance of pages into consideration when deciding in what order the ads will appear (which will mean that effective PPC campaigns will need at least some basic organic SEO), point to one obvious result–an increase in the number of companies that investigate organic SEO programs, whether internally generated or provided by outside search engine marketing firms.
3 eMarketer
4 Marketing Sherpa study, 2015
5 Jupiter Research, 2015
6 iProspect
Why should a company bother to use SEO if it can buy pay-per-click ads?
A company can always buy pay-per-click (PPC) ads on search engines. These ads appear whenever users query specific keywords. However, JupiterResearch has found that the average company gets about 80 percent of its commercial search engine referrals from organic results and the rest from PPC ads. So while PPC ads can complement organic search results, particularly when doing seasonal promotions, they are no substitute.
