One of the more remarkable developments over the last few years in SEO has certainly been the intelligence increase of Google & Yahoo! (and MSN to a lesser degree). From 1997-2002, a page really needed to be "optimized" for search engines in ways that differed from how they were "designed" for visitors. Bravo! to the engines for closing this gap - now, it's our turn to interpret that sequence of events and draw it out to its many logical conclusions...

One of these is how we author title tags & meta descriptions. This has gone from a game of keyword stuffing and phrase manipulation to the art of writing headlines - an almost exact parallel with the PPC task of writing the ad title and description. Yet, when I look around the web at competitive search results, the ad copy is still considerably better at drawing in visits - For example, if you were to reverse the paid and organic results, I'm betting the advertisers would see a dramatic drop-off in CTR, while the organic results would receive a huge boost.

How is it that we, as SEOs, have forgotten that we're not just competing for rank. we're competing for eyeballs and clicks, too?

Let's examine a few listings:

Andreoni.com could certainly take some tips from the paid listings about writing for the audience, but where they really lose out is by putting their location - Montreal, Quebec, suggesting to potential clickers that they're only serving one geographic market. About.com runs its title and description too long, but the results aren't bad. However, Starting the description with their second sentence would almost certainly bolster CTR, and the repetitious title tag could be significantly more compelling by removing the "business card design" from the front and letting the rest of the title show through (layout ideas and tutorials).

None of the three organic listings appear to be attempting to pull in searchers with the same veracity that the paid results have. While TheWineBuyer.com shockingly doesn't use the word "champagne," it's obviously paying off with a high CTR (or they're paying an arm and a leg to have that front position). ChampagneGifts.com is doing better, but I'd wager that both would benefit from having a price range and timing for their shipping (i.e. overnight shipping avail). Wine.com & Costco.com have really let me down here - they clearly have relevant inlinks on the subject, but have failed to properly target and direct the engines and their users. Neither have the keywords in the title tag of any page on their site (check costco and wine.com).

The new Cingular Blackjack is making me feel inadequate about my "Q," but Cingular themselves should be feeling pretty awful about their own inadequacy on the search results for the phone. Although they're ranking first, the results pages Google's showing are not something I'd be likely to click on. The first result has no relevance to the Blackjack and the second is "coming soon." In a display of delectable irony, their PPC team has authored a very nice listing - they're paying for a result that probably costs them thousands every day in extra PPC that could be fixed simply by optimizing the pages that already rank organically.

Wirefly is even smarter - telling searchers that there's a sale price and describing the phone in the way it's advertised on TV - as a "slim samsung smartphone" rather than a "compact 3g."

Generally, this issue comes down to a matter of motivation. The PPC result team is incredibly focused on the ad copy, while the organic team doesn't have the same pressure to perform in this particular area (usually). Certainly, the limited stats shown in the PPC admin panels provide extra knowledge and incentive (as opposed to the great effort required to compare CTR for organic results).

However, I think the same rules that apply in PPC apply to SEO, too - once you're in the top 3-5 results, the CTR, landing page quality and ad copy all directly influence performance (through clicks & conversion) and rank (indirectly, through how many people choose to link to you).

So, take a lesson from those PPC specialists and make those high rankings work for you - steal everyone else's eyeballs and clicks and you can have even more than just a high rank.

p.s. While working on this post, I found one of Google's odder graphic tweaks for the holidays in a search for christmas tree - check out the blue line that separates organic from paid results - it's been replaced by little xmas trees!