December 16, 2003

Summary: Most business users continue to search in engines until they find relevant results, not stopping on the first page or settling for an advertisement.

EXCLUSIVE: Survey respondents consisted of a sample of primarily U.S. small business owners, marketing and advertising specialists, and those in business management positions.

There were 475 total respondents to the entire survey.

Question 1:
Do you know when a search engine listing is paid or unpaid?

Yes: 229 (51%)
No: 221 (49%)

Detail & Analysis

Nearly half of those surveyed among the business community state that they do not recognize the difference between paid search listings and unpaid.

This may be for numerous reasons:

1) Many people in the business world are aware of sponsored listings on search engines.

2) Search engines have distinguished sponsored links from the rest of their results.

What is interesting is that 49% of the business community that uses search engines for searching are not sure when a search engine listing is paid for, or organic.

While some search engines, Google for example, make an effort to differentiate its ads from its organic search results. Other search engines like MSN search do not do so good of a job, cloaking paid results with organic.

From Loren Baker
Source: The Search Engine Journal

        

Read Serge Thibodeau's daily blogs on search engines at Serge Thibodeau Live. We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.