I’ll be at SMX East in Manhattan late on Monday and all of Tuesday; if any of my readers are also attending, please say hello (I’m reachable by Twitter – @webmetricsguru).   I thought I’d throw in some Organic and Paid Search Research I’m doing – I blurred the details to protect the innocent.

For one thing, I was surprised, looking at the Paid Data, that advertising per click was cheaper in the first 2 or 3 positions in Search and got progressively more expensive (maybe that’s due to buying impressions in bulk, especially at the top):

Meanwhile, I hunted around and found some information on average Click Through Rate by Search Position in Search Results; this information is as accurate as it can be, under the circumstances  – here’s a chart of that information, below:

Yet, while the majority of all the action happens on the first or second Search Result (SERP), the 4th, 11th and 17th Position in Organic (Natural) Search had a golden lining but wasn’t being optimized as well as it could be.

As far as the customers were concerned, after position 4 in the Search Results, it was all “long tail” traffic takes time and effort to seed and control.

Interestingly enough, there’s usually a lot of low hanging fruit to any campaign, and this one has been no exception -

While being sensitive to situations where paid spend (an ad) is clicked on when a perfectly good search result was also in the first page, I detected some interesting mismatches (see below):

One of the things that occurred to me is that while Paid Search is fairly well optimized in terms of spend, it’s hardly ever balanced against Organic Search results with an eye on reducing spend – cases where an organic result is perfectly good and providing coverage but where there’s also a paid ad for the same site – sometimes the paid ad “cannibalizes” traffic that would have just as easily clicked on the Organic search result.

In order to optimize Paid Spend against Organic Search Traffic – I’ve found 2 tools that are particularly useful – Ranking Manager 6.0 and Google WebMasterTools Search Query Logs.

The interesting thing about Google’s service is, when your site is verified, able to show you the average position of any key phrase that drove traffic to your site, including those you never knew to search for.   Google WebMasterTool also shows the average position in Google when a specific url was clicked on based on the keyword traffic.

My basic philosophy for optimizing paid / organic traffic is to determine the rankings of all the keywords you care about, using Ranking Manager 6.0 and merging that with your paid data, determining which keywords you have organic results for in the first page of results and cutting spend down by a certain percentage; in my model, I did not reduce paid search spend past the first page of results though I consede, my charts, above, suggest one could and, perhaps, should consider optimizing paid spend right up to position 30- but that’s a lot of work.

Anyway, I tried to find a chart showing how Social Media ranks in Search Results, particlarly Google, but the best I could find was this post in SearchEngineLand -

Leveraging Social Media Sites To Increase Search Visibility