Organic search is essentially free – you don’t pay for clicks, but you will need to invest in other areas (for example website improvements, content and copywriting, link-building and PR) to get to the top of the search engines. It takes longer to achieve these results. The upside can be massive.
But until you get there, embracing paid search can provide you with high visibility in the short term. It can support your best performing pages. Paid search can also be used to plug gaps in your natural search strategy, where your website’s pages don’t rank so well in the organic listings.
You should also consider how people use websites. Typically, the eye will automatically aim for the left of the page, rather like reading a book. As such, content that appears on the top left of a
web page tends to see the most action. Because most paid search ads are placed on the right they receive fewer clicks, as can be seen on the image below (the peaks indicate click activity).
