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Paid Listings Becoming More Relevant Than Organic Results? 
By: Mr. Frog 2006-09-06 It's long been an article of faith among many Web users that the organic results served up by the search engines' algorithms are more relevant to most users' queries than the paid results. A large part of this perception has been manufactured by the search engines themselves, each of which seeks to endear itself to users as an "honest broker" whose neutral algorithms will unerringly separate the wheat from the chaff. The idea that organic results are "pure" is an inherently appealing one. But in actuality, the situation is a lot more complicated, and in many instances, paid listings actually provide better, more useful results than organic results. The first instance where paid listings consistently provide more relevant results occurs when a user makes a query with local intent, for example, "plumber" or "office cleaning services." In this case, the search engine's ad server automatically geo-targets paid results, based on the user's IP number, which is mapped against a location database. So a user making such a search from New York will see paid listings for New York-based plumbers and janitors. Organic listings, however, do not reflect the user's location unless the user types in an additional term to indicate a location, such as "plumber NYC" or "plumber New York." Of course, the fact that organic results aren't geo-targeted may not always produce less relevancy (if I'm researching the history of plumbing or whether plumbers in the U.S. belong to a union, I won't care about plumbers in my neighborhood). But for certain queries which clearly demonstrate a local intent, geo-targeted paid listings may deliver more relevancy than organic listings can. The second instance in which paid listings may provide better relevancy is more subtle than the above example. This phenomenon is caused by systemic structural biases affecting the way that organic and paid listings are served. Organic results are, of course, subject to manipulation by wily SEO practitioners paid by their clients to secure the best ranking positions for their sites. None of the folks who practice SEO optimization like to be labeled as cheaters or manipulators, especially because many of them do provide a useful service to their clients by guiding them toward improving the search engine friendliness of their sites. But there are enough of them who will freely admit that they practice tricks and tactics which go beyond simple optimization into the zone of manipulation. To these folks, the ends (getting top rankings for their clients) justify whatever means they use to trick the engines into thinking that a given site is more relevant than it actually is. The engines naturally seek to discourage such behavior, and do impose economic disincentives which constrain the optimizers' activities on an ad hoc basis. Severe penalties can obtain whenever an optimizer "crosses the line" and gets caught, as we saw earlier this year when BMW.de and Ricoh.de were removed from Google's index for practicing deceptive tactics. The threat of these penalties does serve as a disincentive against extreme "black hat" optimization tactics, but beyond this, does nothing to enhance relevancy in the organic results space. As a rule, the more traffic that results-manipulation can get for the SEO types, the richer they will become, whatever negative impact on relevance such manipulation may have, and this irresistible economic reality is what drives the optimizers behavior. At the same time, a very different battle with its own set of economic rules is being waged among marketers running paid search campaigns. Each of these marketers seeks the highest possible SERP listings position at the lowest possible keyword acquisition price. Obviously, only one contestant can win this battle at any point in time, and bid price is only one factor determining who the winner is. Because the engines seek to maximize the number of clicks they sell, marketers serving ads which attract more clicks are rewarded with lower bid prices than those which don't (the exception is Yahoo, although it will very soon switch over to such a system). In a nutshell, the engines' auctions provide powerful economic incentives for marketers to produce the most compelling, most likely-to-be-clicked-upon, most relevant results. The fact that this result, which maximizes the engines' revenues, happens to accord with users' desire for relevancy, is one of the happier coincidences in the search marketing industry. Another factor enforcing relevancy in the paid search marketplace is the fact that marketers are penalized for attracting traffic which is not relevant. Ironically marketers seeking to advertise with irrelevant terms or with less-then-relevant creative are often attracting traffic which is less likely to convert. For example, if you work for a law firm which specializes in civil practice, you would not want people looking for criminal defense attorneys to click on your ad. So it would be foolhardy to bid highly to gain top rankings for the term "lawyer" because you'd be wasting tens, perhaps hundreds of dollars each day paying the engines for clicks of which a high percentage will never convert. On the other hand, if your firm happened to have high organic rankings for the term "lawyer," you wouldn't really mind if 75 percent of your clicks came from people seeking criminal defense attorneys. Nor would you take any steps to "de-optimize" your site to decrease the inbound traffic, even though most of it will never convert. After all, organic traffic is free (once you get the position with or without SEO help)! As you can see, two very different sets of incentives and disincentives operate to determine the production of organic and paid search results. One is biased towards relevancy; the other against relevancy. While it is true that top-ranking organic results are rarely totally irrelevant, SEO's can game the system easily enough to manufacture a sense of relevancy which is in fact a phantom. Because there are no built-in penalties for doing so (except when one "crosses the line" and is caught), this practice is rampant, degrading the relevancy of organic results. With paid search, we have exactly the opposite situation: marketers are rewarded for enhancing relevancy, not degrading it, and this tends to enhance the relevancy of paid results. While it's true that a marketer who cares only about traffic, and not about conversions or ROI, could run ads which were irrelevant to a user's queries in an attempt to cast a wide net, such a marketer would pay an enormous penalty. For this reason, few marketers engage in this behavior. Even marketers looking to build brand using paid search will get more for their dollar if their content is relevant and engaging. As the search engines evolve their strategies for battling falsely inflated organic results, it is likely that this phenomenon will increase, given the inevitable operation of these opposing economic systems across the behavior of thousands of marketers. Add to  Del.icio.us |  Digg |  Yahoo! My Web |  Furl
Have a bookmark! -  About the Author: Mr. Frog is a leading Search industry visionary. Mr. Frog is a member of the Did-it Search Marketing team which accompanies him to most major marketing conferences. |
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