Organic or Paid Search? Answer: Pay Up
June 16, 2020
There is a weird symbiosis. Unlike the sucker fish clamped on a shark, the predator’s fellow travelers operate in the dark digital ocean. “Organic Vs Paid Search: Explained” correctly points out that traffic costs money. This is not 1994, gentle reader. This is 2020 and the costs of running an ad supported search engine are difficult to control.
The write-up ignores a simple fact: Online advertising companies want anyone who wants clicks and traffic to pay. Like the IRS oriented phrase: Death, taxes, and the online traffic levy.
This means that “organic search” — the 1994 style of Web indexing — is dead like dinosaurs. The future is pay to play.
As output devices become smaller and voice creeps forward as a way to explain where to get a pizza, the free loading sucker fish are going to get scraped off the digital shark. The shark will then eat the sucker fish.
What’s this mean for search engine optimization? More baloney, more hand waving, and another lost cause.
Pay to play, the phrase of the future. There’s no cyber Mother Theresa to intervene.
Stephen E Arnold, June 16, 2020