SEO is THE Driving Force of Traffic to your Website
Let this sink in for a moment…
49% of all searches result in NO click
<4% of all searches result in a Paid Ad being clicked
>47% of all searches end with an organic (non-paid) result being clicked
So why is it that are you so consumed with PPC/SEM?? Oh right… it’s because Google says so.
Why doesn’t Google push SEO? Oh right… because Google doesn’t make any money from it.
There are less clicks today than a number of years ago in part due to the influence and placement of paid ads on a Google search page, as well as Google simply getting better at providing the information a user needs more accurately. No need to pull a second query if the answer is staring you right in the face. Proper SEO makes sure to tell Google what a page is about and structures it in such a way that a user can more easily identify it as such. For more detailed queries, the same philosophy still works as a more detailed query and will require a click-through in order to assimilate more details.
That being said, without proper SEO techniques being utilized, results associated to you and your website won’t rank as high (and we all know that people rarely look beyond the first page of results) AND won’t be structured in such a way that a user will be able to easily and quickly identify a page’s true content and value to their search.
The other thing to note here is that PPC/Paid Ads, satisfy SO few clicks that proper SEO provides MUCH better ROI (Return on Investment). The other thing about PPC is that a CTR (Click Through Rate) of 5% is generally absolutely terrific. I talked to a client the other day who was getting upwards of a 8% CTR. I told her that was fantastic but than asked her what those clicks did for her business. She didn’t know and her PPC service provider (Dealer Spike) didn’t provider her with any stats that didn’t look positive. A closer look told me that over 50% of those clicks bounced, therefore providing ZERO value… although they were charged for each one! Also, those who didn’t bounce actually stayed on their website about half as long as an organic visitor.
Food for thought.
Thanks to Rand Fishkin’s post for this very valuable statistical insight.