What defines an "Organic" search?

An organic search defined by google is:

“Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being advertisements. In contrast, non-organic search results may include pay per click advertising.”

Pretty interesting but straightforward stuff. Basically an organic search result are the results that are not paid per click advertisements, adwords etc. I mean that's all well and good, but why organic searching? Why not just pay per click?

Organic searches were found to have a particular amount of success, A study by BrightEdge concluded that organic searches were the largest driver of revenue, over paid search, within most areas studied. According to Groupons marketing team, 60% of all direct traffic is of organic search, and according to BloomReach 49% of the UK consumers use organic search to find retailers.

However in further studies from Slingshot SEO, it was concluded that 18% of organic clicks go to the first results, 10% to the second and 7% to the third. That means 35% of organic searches go to the top three results of an organic search. Mind blowing.

What does that mean for the business itself interested in SEO strategies? Well with 79% of all people clicking on the natural search results, and 80% not clicking on PPC(paid per click) advertisements. It seems logical to invest in natural search results.

Now this opens up some interesting thoughts, why do companies focus so heavily on PPC when organic search results seem much better? Well suppose that 20% of people that do click on your ad, they could potentially be more likely to be interested in your product. Increasing in your revenue. Customer commitment and all that.

So why does PPC fail so heavily? While organic results sky rocket the company to greatness? Well my interpretation of it all is that people really don't like being sold something forcefully, PPC seems forced and the psychology would mean that people would shy away from something and choose something that seems a little more authentic and natural. However in reality getting your results to the top of google is tremendously difficult, and requires hard work and strong SEO team. Particularly if the keywords you'd like to use are high trafficking. PPC means that you can be at the top of google for an arbitrary price.

I suppose it's status, high ranking google means you're high in the standing, to people that's respectful and for a business having your clients respect is paramount to achieving a strong customer base. Page one google rankings helps that.

Anyway, that's enough of my interpretation of the situation.

Really, if you have ever heard of eye tracking and heatmaps, there's a much simpler and easier to digest version. People will view the content in an F-Shape, starting from the top left, scanning the words until they reach the end and moving on to the next line. This is all well and good, but the thing is, with each line the users become more and more disinterested, and thus create an F shape, where the centre line of an f is smaller than the top and so on and so forth. So by the time the user hits the third of fourth line they're not even taking in half the information on the sentence and they are just scanning and hoping for key words of relevance
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As you can see from the image, the F-shape model holds true, with 91% of google users seeing the top paid results and 100% of users seeing all organic results.

9% of the users don't even bare witness to the top paid advertisements, that's a shocking amount, for every 1,000 searches, 90 people don't even give your ad a glance. That's insane amounts of revenue lost. In contrast if you have a result on the first page you are guaranteed to get a look in, with 100% looking at all organic results, with more intensity of concentration towards the top of the page.

To be within the top three organic search results are paramount if you really want to reach for the sky, it'll open up more opportunities and provide exposure to your business or website. Investing in a strong SEO team, or even trying to do some yourself is worthwhile.

My name is George, thank you for reading.