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Editorial vs. Sponsored Listings

For the purposes of search engine marketing, editorial listings differ from sponsored listings in cost: editorial listings are free. As a market trend, the bids for sponsored listings have been becoming more and more expensive as the number of competing websites has been rising. Clearly, there is an advantage to achieving high editorial listings in the search engines.

So, why would anybody ever sign up to be in the sponsored listings and pay money to appear in the search engine results? Here is a quick summary of reasons, and below is a more detailed explanation of them:

• to appear in the search results fast
  
• to test the performance of your keywords
  
• to make sure you appear under less relevant terms your site is not optimized for

One of the major reasons is that it is a quick way to make sure your site appears in the search engine results under a particular term. Optimizing your website may take time, and it also takes time to get indexed by the search engines after the optimization. For instance, if you add a new product to your online store, and you want to start selling it immediately, you cannot afford to wait months to start being listed in the search engine results for the product name.

Another situation in which sponsored listings are quite valuable is when you are just beginning your search engine marketing campaign. While in the process of keyword research, you realize that you’re not quite sure which terms will drive more qualified traffic. In other words, you can make a guess as to which terms people would use to search for your product or service, but making guesses in the search engine marketing business could be costly. After all, how can you be certain of user searching behavior unless you test it out? You guessed it – the cheapest and easiest way of doing so before you spend thousands on your search engine marketing campaign is to test our performance of your tentative key terms in one of the pay-per-click search engine services. After observing the results for a time as short as a few days, you can make a much better guess about which terms will be more beneficial for your website as the target key terms. On top of the click-through rate, some pay-per-click programs such as Overture and Google AdWords can also tell you the conversion rate on a particular term. After you have this data, you can apply the knowledge you have towards your search engine marketing strategy in your effort to achieve editorial listings.

Another viable reason to use the sponsored listing service is to make sure your site appears in the search results under terms that you don't optimize for. Some websites have far too many potentially valid key phrases, and it is not realistic to expect good search engine rankings on all of them. So, you would probably optimize only for the most important ones, and bid modestly on the less important ones in a pay-per-click campaign.

Currently the major players in the pay-per-click industry in the US market are Overture, Google AdWords, and About.com Sprinks. When the user queries an engine that draws information from one of these services, the sponsored listings appear separately from the editorial listings. Another major search engine service, LookSmart, also charges its accounts on a pay-per-click basis using a flat click fee, but this service is different as the customer is actually paying to be included in the main search results section.