26 February 2009 | Author: M. Thomson SEO & Affiliate Consultant

Is Google reaping rewards in paid search for information queries?

AdWords, where websites bid against one another to rank higher up the paid search ladder, is Google's main form of revenue. Here at bigmouthmedia, we've noticed that Google's move towards universal search results and the organic algorithm may be forcing websites to make increased use of AdWords, resulting in subsequently increased revenue for Google.

How you ask? Well let's take look from a retail website perspective:

When it comes to definitions, user search queries fall under three generic types:

Navigational - Intent to find a website of a particular person or organisation.
Informational - Looking for particular data on any given subject.
Transactional - Looking for a subject with the goal to convert.

Typically, informational queries have a higher search volume and take a longer amount of time and effort to rank organically. Retail queries are often informational with a transactional intent. However, Google does not take this into consideration; it simply applies its algorithm to the query when determining which results to return.

With Google's move to make the web more "universal", results for informational queries are becoming saturated with video, image and shopping results. This makes the chance of a retail site receiving a percentage of the clicks for a query much lower.

With this in mind, in order to get immediate exposure (organic takes longer), many websites turn to AdWords to drive towards them much needed traffic.

It seems likely that this will have a positive impact on AdWords' revenue, particularly since only one of the returned results in the example below is a transactional website and the rest are informational. Users looking to then purchase could find themselves being drawn to the paid search results on the right to find their goal; particularly if effective creatives are used.



























And this behaviour could result in a trend with longterm implications. Web users are creatures of habit; if users frequently find themselves looking towards the paid search side of results due to a lack of relevance in the organic listings, it could be that this ends up as the first call of action for their next query. Users may then begin to use paid search ads as "if they were organic" results, which could then ramp up advertisers fee's and sway the percentages of organic vs. paid search.

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