SEA vs. SEO - Sibling Rivalry?

Ever since I started exploring the world of search engines I’ve been asking myself how much the financial interest of these corporations (Google made $33.3 billion in revenue between Q3 2010 – Q2 2011) opposed to the selfless intent of providing a service to humanity, would affect the essence of their product

In other words, do search engines pay particular attention to generous advertisers when filtering results? Does the size of your budget affect so-called “organic” search?

Recently I’ve been (re-)tweeting about the 20 most expensive (or most profitable, depending on how you look at it) keywords on Google Ads.

An insurance company has to pay $54.91 for every click that attracts new customers who search for auto insurance price quotes. Now, assuming that most of insurance companies who actually plan a campaign including these pricey keywords, are also generally speaking good spenders, I have a suspect that they could be rewarded for their generous contribution.

This debate, whether search engines prioritises optimized sites that spend also significantly on their SEA, has gone on for a long time and with no substantiation.

To illustrate better my point, see the following scenarios:

Case 1: A Good SEO designed website + poor or no Adwords spend

In most cases SEO design alone, with a particular focus on quality content, an easy to navigate website and sufficient backlinks from relevant sites, will generate a good regular increase of traffic, proportional to the size of your business (and obviously the type of business). Most websites who actively benefit from SEO techniques (and there are luckily not too many out there who do it correctly) without even opening an Adwords account are well ranked and easy to find in top positions on relevant Search Engine Results Pages.

Case 2: A Good SEO designed website + efficient Adwords campaign

If you can afford this approach, you are well on your way. You attract a variety of traffic because of your product which is presented brilliantly on a well designed, well structured website. The website will be developed based on SEO premises with backlinks from relevant sites. Added to this you will decide to invest a sizeable portion of your digital marketing budget on search engine advertising. This will result in the attraction of ever more browsers who will share and talk about your product, with the intended ultimate result being so-called viral distribution.

Case 3: No SEO + expensive Adwords campaign

This case is definitely not desirable. You could obtain some results, especially when it comes to e-commerce sites. However, even if you attract a lot of traffic (thanks to ingenious messages and special offers), this will not result in quality traffic because in a badly structured digital environment, your conversion statistics (in this case the actual purchase and check-out) will not be at a satisfactory level. Imagine shopping in a supermarket, which is more like a labyrinth than a store (most of them are), I’m sure you won’t be visiting again soon (if you manage to get out obviously).

Case 4: No SEO – NO Adwords

Considering that basic SEO is not an expensive investment and anyone can implement it (meta description, meta keywords, title tags at least), without it you might just as well forget about creating a website all together. I suggest you rather invest in designing and printing a brochure because there is nothing worse than stumbling upon misleading search results. They merely become annoying obstacles to SEOs out there.

In conclusion, I think that there is absolutely no way of knowing whether Google favours websites that bid for Adwords over websites that don’t.
We would need to submit two identical sites, at the same time, with the same domain name and allocate Adwords budget only to one, to see what the search engine response would be. However, this will never be possible, since two identical domain names can't exist, additionally the search engine penalizes duplicated content.

Only if this absurd test could be conducted, will we be able to settle this debate with a satisfactory answer, but since this is impossible, I tend to believe that search engines will never reveal their preferences between customers and disciples.

What do you think?