Organic Search

Organic search results refers to those listings in search engine results pages that appear by dint of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being adverts.

Background

The Google, Yahoo, MSN and Live! search engines combine advertising and search results on their search results pages. In each case, the adverts are designed to look like the search results, except for minor visual distinctions such as their background color and/or placement on the page. Further, the appearance of the adverts on all major search engines is so similar to the genuine search results that a large majority of search engine users cannot effectively distinguish between them.

Because so few ordinary users (38% according to Pew) realized that many of the highest placed 'results' on search engine results pages were actually adverts, it became important within the SEO industry to distinguish between the two types of content. As the perspective among general users was that ALL the results were in fact 'results', the qualifier 'organic' was invented to distinguish the real search results from the adverts. Because the distinction is important (and the word 'organic' has many useful metaphorical uses) the term is now in widespread use within the search engine optimization and web marketing industry.

Google claims that their users click (organic) search results more often than adverts, which has led them to rebutt the research cited above.

The same report (and others going back to 1997) by Pew shows that users avoid clicking 'results' that they know to be adverts.

Achieving high organic search listings is a primary strategy of search engine optimisation.