Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

An interesting study was recently completed regarding user's preferences for paid and natural (organic, free, unpaid, etc) search results. I found it very interesting, although not surprising, that there were huge differences in user behavior between the different search engines. A lot of that difference is probably due to the way results are presented in the different search engines. The main idea I get out of all this is that it is best to be listed in both the natural and paid search results whenever possible, but be sure to focus on getting good listings in Google's natural search results.

It's not really clear how they conducted this study or how they selected the participants, but it appears to be skewed towards Internet users who spend a lot of time online. There's nothing wrong with that, I just wonder what the results would be like with a broader mix of users. I also think you could get different results by using a broad range of search terms. For example, some keywords yield more relevant results in the paid listings, while other keywords serve up the best results in the natural search results. There are so many factors that could get involved, it would be interesting to see this same type of study conducted on a broader scale.

Anyway, here's a link to the article on Clickz.

Also, as a sidenote, I remember reading about a similar study conducted by the IAB and Comscore last summer that looked at click and conversion rates for paid versus natural search.
Here's the Clickz article
And a good explanation of what's wrong with the Comscore study