Brafton has reported that paid search spend is on the rise this year, and while paid search is an important part of internet marketing, brands should take note that consumers spend more time with organic results than paid ones. A new report from User Centric indicates that organic results command searchers’ attentions.
The survey aimed to discern whether internet users are more engaged by paid search ads on Google or Bing, but it seems to show that organic results are the ultimate winners. The study found that the majority of consumers look at paid search ads, but 100 percent of searchers peruse organic results.
For the record, Google ads get more attention than Bing ads. Consumers who consider paid ads spend nine-tenths of a second looking at paid search ads on the top of Google result pages, while they spend just seven-tenths of a second looking at paid ads on the top of Bing pages. But the amount of time spent looking at paid search results significantly pales in comparison to the time spent with organic results.
Searchers spend up to 14.7 seconds looking at the organic results offered in Google. They spend an average of 10.7 seconds with organic results on Bing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, higher-ranking results command more attention than lower-ranking results on both sites.
For marketers, this indicates that search engine optimization strategies are an important method of attracting clicks from internet users. Compelling headlines, quality content in rich snippets and frequent updates reflected by recent dates of page publication will be important to demonstrating the relevancy of content.
Notably, Brafton has reported that Google defends its decision to include dates in result snippets because the freshness of a page is a measure of whether it is “relatively recent or evergreen content … or something that is really stale and out of date.”
