Why Search Engine Results Beat Sponsored Links Anytime

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. So make sure you scoff at anyone who tells you something is “free.” If you receive traffic from some place and it costs nothing, but you had to spend 300 hours to generate it, was it free? No, at worst, you could have earned a minimum wage for those 300 hours. That is—at worst—it cost you 300 hours multiplied by your minimum wage.

At best, you could have been doing something productive with your business that would have earned you ten times more than the minimum wage earned during each of those hours. So don’t listen to this “free traffic generation” nonsense. Even traffic that comes from search engines has a cost – and that’s your time.

Now, with that caveat in mind, there is such thing as relatively cheaper traffic. If it takes you very little time to optimise your search for the search engines—and the result is considerable “organic” search engine traffic—well, great; you should generate traffic through search engine optimisation.

In general, traffic that comes from search engine optimisation does actually turn out to be quite cheap. In exchange for the time it takes to create some relevant content, use the proper tags, and exchange a few links, you could get a steady flow of several hundred visitors per day to your site.

If your wage is the only cost, this will be relatively cheap in comparison to pay per click traffic, which could cost you several dollars per visitor.

Other than simply being cheap, organic search engine traffic is also good for a number of other reasons. One obvious reason is that you do not have to spend time monitoring the flow of organic SEO traffic for fear that you will exceed your budget.

With PPC, you have to constantly check your Adwords account and other PPC accounts to determine how well your ads are performing. This is not so with organic search engine traffic. And the less time you spend thinking and actually generating traffic, the more you profit per visitor. If you spend your whole day watching statistics and you think you’re in profit – then you’re not adding your own wage to the equation.

Another major benefit to using organic search engine traffic is that it tends to convert better. In fact, many experts would argue that it converts much better than links from “sponsored” sections – even if they are on a search engine.

People tend to be considerably more skeptical of anything that looks like an advertisement. In contrast, if your site comes up as the first non-sponsored result on Google for a particular keyword, you will gain enormous credibility for that fact alone.

Last, there is one other major benefit of organic search engine traffic: high rankings tend to beget high rankings. That is – if you maintain the top position for certain keywords on Google, there’s a good chance sites will start linking to you, as you will be considered an “authority” on your topic.

This will solidify your top ranking and also improve your ranking for other keywords. In this sense, high search engine rankings can beget high search engine rankings.

And there you have it: there are several major benefits to using organic search engine traffic over popular alternatives, such as pay per click traffic.

Even though organic search engine traffic isn’t truly “free”—it costs your time at the very least—it may be considerably cheaper than other forms of traffic generation. Not only will it convert better than “sponsored links,” but it may beget future traffic; and will cost comparatively less.