Going after the illusive number one spot in Google SERP’s can be a hard task, especially for highly competitive terms.  The more competitive the term of course, the harder it will be to rank well organically and the more it will cost per click for paid search results.

So what’s the best route to take?

Google recently concluded that it is beneficial to yield results in both organic and paid listings.  Their reasoning for this was that only 9% of the time does a paid result show with an accompanying organic listing in the top rank.

Even if your website does rank well in Google’s top five with an accompanying paid listing, the clicks on the paid listing are not replaced by clicks on the organic result if the paid listing is removed.

A study found that clicks on the paid listing actually increase when the organic result is also listed between two and four.  This means that even top rankings can benefit from an accompanying paid listing.