Holding Down A True Top Ranking

[kidder]

Over the Easter holiday period it appears as if a few of the adwords advertisers dropped out of the market we are in. As a result we had two sites that got a taste of the "actual" top positions for a few days and the spike in traffic was better than decent. On my rough numbers it's about a %40 jump but there might be some seasonal factors in play as well. The point is that even with great organic results your still missing out on the real volume in a lot of cases. #1 is actually #4 and with the highly variable adwords content sitting at the top of the searches Google traffic referrals might change a lot more from day to day than you think.

[Planet13]

This is entirely true. I realized this when some of my keywords that had been #2 forever were now getting less and less traffic. After checking the serps, it became painfully obvious;

Adwords, image search, site links (for the #1 site) and google merchant results had pushed the #2 organic result (me) down below the fold.

Unrelated to SEO, but while on the subject of Adwords...

My tests (very low volume) showed me that if you are a site with not much brand name recognition, and you are above the fold in the organic serps, using adwords can help your click through rate in your organic listings.

Apparently, people who might not have clicked through to your site because they are not familiar with it are more inclined to click through if they see an Adword listing your name as well. It just makes them feel more confident that you are a real business.

Bear in mind, this was very low volume that I tested this out on.

[tedster]

I saw the same effect with a client who was just starting up in a competitive market. I've also seen no such synergy in other cases, so you're right that the approach needs to be tested. You can usually test with very low $$$ and learn quickly whether it will work or not in a particular case.

When it does works well, the total clicks and conversions can be amazingly higher than the individual numbers suggest.

[kidder]

I was thinking about the daily ups and downs in traffic volumes from the point of organic refs. A good adwords manager enters your market and knows exactly how to write a good attention grabbing headline and ad copy, the CTR is much higher as a result. Meanwhile the organic listing sitting at #1 suffers a drop in traffic and the webmaster is looking at his own website wondering if there is some other issue in play.. not that there is a lot we can do about it except possibly learn to write our own titles in a manner that will increase CTR. I wonder how many webmasters take the time consider CTR from organic pages..

[Planet13]

...not that there is a lot we can do about it except possibly learn to write our own titles in a manner that will increase CTR...

Excellent Point!