Getting started with Search Engines

If you picture a water funnel through which you pour water into a bucket, then the size of the funnel dictates how much water can be poured into the bucket.

When looking at search engines themselves, you could appear in natural search engine results (often called organic or natural search), or you could pay to have your advert appear on the search engine results pages for specific searches or keywords (called paid search).

If you click on the image of Google results for “ski holiday” to the right (larger image will download and display), the block highlighted in blue shows where organic results appear, and the blocks highlighted in light yellow show where paid for results appear.
In a nutshell, paying for traffic using something like Google Adwords results in immediate traffic (pouring more water into the funnel), so if you have a return on investment model then this makes sense in the short term. It should look something like, “for every £7 we spend with Google Adwords for clicks to our website, we generate £250 in sales; of which £157 is cost of sales and profit is £93”.

Conversely, ranking highly in organic or natural search engine results requires more work and takes longer (a trickle of water into the funnel initially), but through constant optimisation and tweaking can be increased significantly (growing into a constant steady stream of water into the funnel). This effort is well rewarded however, as these results last longer and cost less in the long run when compared to a constant monthly Adwords spend.

For anyone getting started with Search Engines, our humble recommendation for most cases would be to start with a monthly Google Adwords campaign, focussed on very specific keywords relevant to your company (“ski holidays Val Thorens”, rather than “ski holidays”), while building out an organic search campaign in the background, focussed on those same keywords. Over time the organic search will start to do as well or better than the paid for search, at which time you can make the choice to continue with both, or turn off the Adwords campaign.