Natural search results are non-advertisement listing that is returned when a keyword is searched for. A survey conducted by iProspect showed that more than 60 percent of Yahoo users and over 72 percent of Google users clicked on natural search results when looking for the most relevant listing of what the people are searching for.

Most users who opt for natural search results have caused advertisers to change their approach to search engine ads in order to make sure that their Web pages are easily located in the natural search results of  Google and Yahoo.

According to iProspect CEO, Fredrick Marckini, the findings of the survey just means that in both search engines, there is a wide gap between natural search preference and paid advertisement preference.  This also means that the marketers who fail to optimize for natural search or human-edited paid inclusion overlook a huge chunk of user clicks and relevant traffic.

Other findings from iProspect Search Engine User Attitudes Survey included a number of observations. These are:

• 60.5% of Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL users chose a natural search result over paid search advertisements as the most relevant on a simple enquiry.
• 60.8% of Yahoo! and 72.3% of Google search engine users chose a natural search result as the most significant.
• 71.2% of MSN users clicked on a paid search advertisement as the most important to their search.

* AOL users noted that both natural search results and paid search advertisements are equally important.

The presentation of MSN search results makes it possible for MSN users to have such a higher advertiser click rate over other web sites. People who were able to observe this may not be able to differentiate between paid search results from natural results.

Marckini also noted that the reason for this might be brought about by the how the pay per click (PPC) ads are identified within MSN’s returned results. Users who may recoil from paid search listings may have difficulty distinguishing the two types of results. Despite this possible case of mistaken identity, the survey shows it is important to have a presence of a strong paid search advertisement in this specific search engine.

Tags: natural search, natural search results, ROI, search engine, seo, seo optimization, serp, traffic, website traffic