Thread: Organic vs. Paid Search Results

Wow, this totally confirms what we've found in our business.

If you're not in the top 3, you don't exist (for most users).

I just finished "Don't Make me THINK" (a web design book MJ recommended a month or so ago).

Thanks for this.

Speed for you!

-Russ H.

Originally Posted by Russ H

Wow, this totally confirms what we've found in our business.

If you're not in the top 3, you don't exist (for most users).

I just finished "Don't Make me THINK" (a web design book MJ recommended a month or so ago).

Thanks for this.

Speed for you!

-Russ H.

I grabbed the same book and read it.

An EXCELLENT read!

If you notice that on the heat map in the article there are no Paid Results at the top of the page, which indicates that it is an old heat map.

Google of course discovered this golden triangle and moved the top 3 paid results up into the "hottest" area above the organic results.

This resulted in the top 3 paid positions performing substantially better than the ones on the right hand side, but still not nearly as well as the organic results.

Organic results are certainly much more valuable than paid, however for speed or testing ideas, you can't beat the paid results.

btw, if you ever want to do something incredibly useful and see a heat map like that for your own pages (especially your primary landing pages) you can check out:

https://crazyegg.com/pay/plans (4 pages tracked for free, which is plenty to get started)

Guaranteed you'll learn a lot about your visitors and your business by creating a click patten heatmap of your website.

Yep, I use CrazyEgg too. It's great for monitoring what you visitors are doing.

The free account, while it doesn't give me enough impressions for the number of visitors I get, it certainly allows me to produce a sample that is good enough to analyze trends.

I am going to have to echo what Jon has said. PPC is amazing to quickly test a new offer or product. You pay to collect data, than waste time trying to rank in SERPs to collect the same data. Again, time = money.

Bid high to rank high, get a good QS, and you will pay less CPC if you have a great campaign.

Great info here.....I picked up the "Don't make me think" book off of Amazon last night. Speed+++ for John about heat mapping...I will have to check it out again. I have heard that the results are not very accurate though. How has your experience been with it?

Will paying for spots help your organic results? I know that popularity is a factor in googles indexing, so wouldnt paying for results for ahwhile help your page move up the list?