Google Research: If You Rank #1 Organically, Paid Search Doubles Your Clicks

They need to break it down by Navigational, Informational, and Transactional query types. My company's experiments have shown that for informational and transactional, there is some (although not 50%) incremental benefit to a Paid Ad on a search where you are ranked organically #1.

For a Navigational Search, every single experiment we performed resulted in Organic traffic exactly making up for the drop-off in Paid when Ads were turned off.

Finally, they never factor in opportunity cost. By bidding on keywords where you are already ranked #1 organically, you are using budget that you could have used where you aren't ranking organically at all.

SEO and PPC aren't all that different when you get down to it.

SEO might look like "free" traffic and it is if you have no competition, but it takes time and money to rank for a competitive topic. Writing good content costs money, and developing relationships with quality web sites that will make links takes time, which costs money. It takes real effort to make viral content that gets links. And yes, some people buy links or do things with automation and that costs money too.

To make that part of a viable business, of course, you need to connect that to some kind of conversion funnel that makes some revenue.

So the kind of biz that's made the investment to rank #1 for a topic generally finds it's a good investment to buy PPC ads too. There's a powerful psychological effect when people are searching for something and see your link all over the place... it makes you look established, professional, inevitable and all that.

Google generally places 3-4 ads (sometimes more depending on the search term) above organic results in the search engine. My experience in SEO and doing SEO has found that generally, the following statistics (approx) is true regarding the percentage of traffic to the site when ranked in the following positions:

1 - 56%

2 - 13.5%

3 - 9.8%

4 - 4%

5 - 4.8%

6 - 3.3%

7 - 0.4% (generally because of where this result is on people's screens)

8 - 3%

9 - 1.5%

10 - 2.6%

These figures are approximate and can change when looking at different and higher ranking terms. This is just a general overview of percentages of traffic from those queries to particular sites, from my experience.

As a result, the first 5 results take up ~88.1% of all traffic to that particular search term/query. FWIW when I'm doing SEO, I'm only interested in ranking in the first #3 results.

Hence, if you rank #1 in the search engine and there are ads above you, you aren't getting all of the traffic (which of course is why they are there so Google can make money). Hence adding Adwords ads to that particular query and search term, depending on your adwords quality score and if you can get it into the top #3 main ads then you are obviously going to increase your traffic to your website.

Why?

Well if you're #1 in organic results AND you have an adwords ad in the top 3-4 main spots then you have 2 positions in the top #5 results for the query which are receiving ~88.1% of the clicks by users - and having 2 spots in the most trafficed positions you're obviously going to see an increase in clicks!

I did some testing - and my (potentially incorrect) conclusion was that with the ad people ended up going to my site without seeing my competitors (which are pretty much all free downloads). Without the ad, people ended up looking around abit more or something.

For me, keeping the ad made me about 10x what I was spending on it.

Actual source is http://googleresearch.blogspot.de/2012/03/impact-of-organic-... (which sadly requires Javascript to even display anything). The actual research paper is available at http://research.google.com/pubs/pub37731.html

Can someone explain this? I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean what I think it means.