Many businesses are finding new customers by advertising on Google.

However, what you may not realise is that only a small group of people actually click on these paid ads.

Smart business owners are getting most of their clicks for free

The image above shows the typical search result page on Google. Pay-per-Click ads appear on the right-hand side. These are the ads that business owners have splashed the cash for.

In the middle of the image are the ‘organic’ search listings. These listings can’t be purchased by advertisers; they’re the result of Google serving up what it deems to be the best result.

Truth is most folks click on the organic search results. As you can see, the first listing gets over 42% of the clicks alone, while the next three take up another 26%. As you scroll down the percentage declines until you reach the last one – it’s a bit of an anomaly as people often click the result rather than clicking through to a whole new page.

Meanwhile the paid ads over on the right earn between 8% to 0.2%, while the top ten average is just 3.16%. That’s in line with the worst-performing page one organic listing.

If we take a peek at the heat map below we get an even more dramatic view of how dominant the first few organic listings are when it comes to search results.

Google search heat map

Now let’s consider this in dollar and cents with a term that sees 15,000 searches a month. If you had the number one Pay-per-Click position for this term you may receive 2% of the traffic, or 300 clicks. Now let’s presume these clicks are $1.70 each – that’s $510 for a month’s worth of traffic.

Now that doesn’t sound too bad, until you realise if you ranked number one for the same keyword in the organic listings you’d receive 6,300 visitors at virtually no cost.

If you ran the Pay-per-Click ad to achieve the same visitors you’d have to fork out a whopping $10,710.

So why do business owners choose to use Pay-per-Click advertising at all?

Pay-per-Click is often attractive to business owners because it instantly brings potential new customers to their website as soon as they start running the ads.

That’s fine for business owners with money to spare. Me, I prefer to spend the time optimising my website and developing great content and links with the aim of ranking highly in the organic listings.

When it comes to getting traffic to your website from Google, a little bit of work goes a long way.

Tonto Digital provides digital marketing training and coaching to build raving fans and eager new customers. Learn how to rank of Page #1 of Google and generate new customer enquires for your business with our online video course ‘Page #1 of Google’ currently on offer in Antmart for $49 (usually $197) for a limited time only.