Justin Harrison

Having considered this many times over the past few years, I recently decided to conduct a few tests across 4 different websites, the results literally shook me.

First off I have to say that this is not a measure of return on investment, since free search costs nothing, comparing any kind of return on investment in this case would be a futile exercise.

That said I took 4 websites, and created a duplicate of each, essentially creating 8 websites in total. Of the 4 sites, all of them have fairly good search engine rankings – top 30 positions and don’t rely on any traffic other than free search (organic search).

The duplicate sites where created solely for the purpose of driving paid search (PPC) to these pages to track the conversions in relation to the exact same pages listed in the free search under the same keywords and key phrases.

All variables where eliminated to ensure that the only difference between the sites where that one form of traffic was paid for and the other free. This testing was run across all 8 sites for 3 months (90 days in total) and the results calculated at the end of these three months.

The paid placement advertising on the duplicate sites came from:

• Google Adwords
• MSN AdCentre
• Yahoo Sponsored Listing

The majority for free search engine traffic on the original sites came from:

• Google
• MSN
• Yahoo

The conversion tracking undertaken was essentially based on two key conversions:

• Visitors to Leads
• Visitors to Sales

Here are the results:

• Visitors to leads conversion – Paid Search - 18.57%
• Visitors to leads conversion – Free Search - 37.86%

• Visitors to Sales conversion – Paid Search - 1.01%
• Visitors to Sales conversion - Free Search - 4.2%

These tests have left me with no doubt as to which form of traffic provides the best and most qualified traffic. As a result I have concentrated all my efforts towards effective SEO and now only use paid search in the infancy stage of any project.

So how can you put this information to use?

Understanding that free search is without a doubt your best opportunity for doing business online means that you can make the fundamental shift to working and creating SEO strategies to get you listed in the top organic listings.

Sure its allot of hard work, but the reward long term beats any other short term strategy.

Good Luck and Happy Marketing