Organic, Free, Natural - are there any differences in what these words mean for Search Engine Optimization?
Question: -
Q: Why do they use the word 'organic,' isn't it the same meaning as free?
Answer: -
Yes. Organic search results. Natural search results. Free search results. Vs. the PPC results, Pay-per-click, and AdWords results.
The term 'organic' or 'natural' probably came about because these refer to the search engine (be it Google, Yahoo, or Bing) doing its best to identify the best matches for the search query, naturally without any influence of money. This is opposed to the ad results which are a function of the dollar bid and the quality score.
Google and the others are loathe to call them free because that hurts their marketing of their paid products. It would be a very obvious indicator to people that there are FREE results and there are PAID results, and we would all save ourselves a lot of money if we focused on the former.
This gets us to a tension in the Google / Bing / Yahoo model. On the one hand, they want to provide great results for users. But on the other hand they depend on advertising. They don't want the free to be so good and so perfect that they will hurt their paid revenues. This is happening in a big way with Google Local, where Google is not improving the results rapidly at all and seems to have an ulterior motive of driving us all to use PPC / AdWords and paid advertising on Google local rather than improving the search experience.
Sorry to be so cynical!
Hope this helps!
- Jason
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