Even if you're one of the rare people who doesn't have a website you probably hear a lot about search engine optimization (SEO) these days. Those of us who make our living working on the web are well aware of the importance of SEO. In fact, it's so critical it has spawned an entire industry to help folks websites perform better in the search engines.
But have you ever thought about why search engines matter?
It's about one word: traffic.
Turns out search engines are responsible for moving massive amounts of traffic on the web. Exact stats can be a challenge to track down. But depending on whose data you believe anywhere between 70% and 85+% of all traffic on the internet originates from search engines.
That percentage should make you stand up and take note. When you figure that equates to over 113 billion searches per month you begin to see why search engines are so important.
So it becomes pretty easy to see that if your website is not indexed in the search engines then you are missing out on a whole lot of potential visitors. And if it's your business website that isn't indexed, then you are leaving a whole lot of money on the table from potential customers that have no idea you even exist.
It Gets Worse
It is worse than that, though. How many times do you make a search on, say, Google and see something like, "Results 1 - 10 of 45,000,000 for..." in the upper right corner? Sounds impressive, doesn't it?
You might be tempted to think, "well as long as I'm in the 45 million, I'm OK." But that thought is dead wrong.
Because it turns out somewhere in the neighborhood 90% of the time users click on a result on the first page of the results. And half of those click on the very first search result.
What that means is there are 44,999,990 other results that have a miniscule chance of ever getting traffic any time that search term is searched. So obviously if you care at all about how many visitors come to your website you'll want to pay respectful attention to the search engines.
Paid Search vs. Organic Search
One thing to keep in mind is that there are two ways to get traffic from the search engines. You can optimize your site so that it shows up naturally in the search results for a specific search term.
Or you can buy traffic by using the "sponsored results" which are quite simply ads that are usually paid for based on how many times they are clicked on. These ads are sometimes called "Pay Per Click" or just PPC for short.
Here are some factors Google uses to determine how to rank the paid results:
- Price Advertiser Paid
- Price Others Pay
- Click Through Rate
- Relevance of Keywords
- Landing Page Quality
- Account History
- History of Display URL
- "Other Factors"
That last one is Google's catch all so they don't have to reveal all their secrets.
Generally speaking the cost per click of the ad depends on where it is ranked, how competitive the search term is, and (once again) some other factors.
The organic results are ranked based on whatever the search engines feel are the most relevant results available. It doesn't matter how many times they get clicked, it still doesn't cost the website owner anything.
So obviously getting a high ranking for a competitive search term can mean a wholelotta traffic heading to your site. For free.
I don't know about you, but I'm a big fan of free!
