SEO and paid listings03 Jan
The limits of SEO
Site owners often regard SEO as a kind of magic method for promoting their sites. The main purpose of this blog is to provide a step by step understanding of what SEO can do and what it can’t or under certain circumstances the damages bad SEO methods can produce. It is only lately that the great part of site owners seems to have understood how deep PR can be hurt when buying 1.000 IBLs for $20.
We have quite a number of clients coming to us in complain with the damage so called seo specialists produced to their sites using unwise methods. The same story with Search Engine Marketing, when people end up banned on Google Adwords.
Search Engines Result Pages (SERPs) or listings can be a great source of healthy traffic, if its’ well done. However, you should understand that the marketing strategy of your site must not rely on organic search. SEs algorithm change often in order to prevent black hat seo specialist from manipulating the results. A wise SEO, however, will build a steady position of a website regardless algorithm changes.
It looks like only Google gets about 2.900 queries per second, and Google owns about 70% of search market share (IMO about 80% but this is a different story), which make everybody starving a piece of that pie.
Officially, the search market share looks something like this on 2009:
- Google: 63.5 %
- Yahoo: 20.5%
- Microsof: 8.3
- Ask 3.9 %
- AOL 3.8%
From technical perspective, it would be interesting to go deeper into a SE query structure of a real user. You may find on internet the analysis of such a query and draw some conclusions from the SEO point of view. It’s easy to imagine what role may play this chapter into SEs algorithms.
The advantages of SEO
Try also to search on “Eye Tracking, how users scan result pages”. You will learn important facts about the structure and placement of content. Just mention that top left area of the viewport seems to be the most attractive for users’ eyes. The results show that it is a good thing to be #1 on organic search but it might not be the same story with the paid listings.
Statistically, 62% of users click on the search results of the fist page of results and 90% within the first 3 pages. Seeing a company listed among the top results of on SEs make users consider that company on the top one within its field.
Companies are willing to spend more on paid listings than on SEO. However look at the following comparison between the efficiency of the 2 listing types:
| Rank | Visibility from Organic | Visibility from paid listings |
| 1 | 100% | 50% |
| 2 | 100% | 40% |
| 3 | 100% | 30% |
| 4 | 85% | 20% |
| 5 | 60% | 10% |
| 6 | 50% | 10% |
| 7 | 50% | 10% |
| 8 | 30% | 10% |
| 9 | 30% | - |
| 10 | 20% | - |
Conclusions:
The basic ideas of the above links are:
- don’t build all your marketing strategy on SEO;
- it is good to rank well on SEO;
- don’t use black hat techniques;
- use wisely paid listings.

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