What are the differences between paid and organic search?
There are five key differences between paid and organic search. Let’s look at each one of them.
Position
The first difference is that paid search results appear at the top of search engine results pages, and organic results appear beneath them.
Time
Another key difference between paid and organic search is time. With paid search, you can get results quickly whereas, with organic search, results take more time – often weeks, months, and even years. So you have to play the medium to long-term game with organic search.
Payment
As the name suggests, you pay for paid search traffic, with pay-per-click (PPC) on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis.
What that means is, you pay a fee every time a user clicks on your ad. So instead of relying on organic traffic to your website, you buy traffic for your page by paying Google to show your ad when your visitor searches for your keyword.
For organic search, traffic is free, although it does require an investment of both resources and time.
ROI
In terms of the return on investment (ROI), it’s much easier to measure paid search. That’s partly because Google provides more keyword data that you can capture in Google Analytics (GA4).
However, with paid search, ROI can stagnate or decline over time. With organic search, ROI is a little bit harder to measure, but it often improves over time. Over the long term, organic search can offer a very good return on investment.
Share of traffic
When it comes to traffic share, research from BrightEdge found that organic search is responsible for 53% of all site traffic compared to paid at 15%. So the lion’s share of clicks are actually on the organic results.
