The answer to these questions and several other variations, is called “Personalization”.

This is a new concept that was rolled out from Google in December of 2009.  In simple terms, Google is trying to “personalize” YOUR experience.  That is to say that they are trying to show YOU things that YOU seem to be interested in (based on their observations of your computer usage).  If you have done this search several times and have never clicked on the ad, then Google says “hmmm…  he/she must not be interested in that.”  As a result, they might not show you those ads.

This is a great information page from Google about Personalization.  It includes a video that explains the concept further:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html

This article from Business Week’s blog further explains the concept of “personalized search”:

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/12/google_gets_rea.html

This paragraph from this article (near the bottom) explains this concept well.

Last Friday, Google quietly rolled out a feature which may have even greater impact on Web users — though many are unlikely to notice. With something the company calls Personalized Search, Google will start showing different search results for different users, depending on which links they have clicked the most in the past. In theory this means that eventually, a car lover and a zoologist typing “jaguar” into the search field will wind up with two different sets of search results.

With the decline in the economy, customer acquisition is becoming more and more vital.  As the focus on customer acquisition increases, SEO becomes a more vital part of the overall marketing strategy.  Because SEO provides a long term strategy for increased consumer presence, it has added value as compared to paid search marketing.

“Search Marketing Trends: Back to Basics” reports that SEO growth will grow from 17.7% to 20.3% while paid search will decline from 15.9% in 2009 to 11.3% in 2013.  When searching for information, consumers find more value in organic search results than pay per click (PPC) advertising.  The value placed by consumers on organic search results garners more clicks on these results thus making SEO a valued part of the marketing plan.

Combining SEO and PPC marketing efforts may result in higher search engine result rankings.  Paid search engine advertising offers more immediate results, but in order to see results in the search engine arena advertising must be consistent.  SEO marketing results occur over a longer time frame, but result in organic search results more valued by consumers.

In order to gain the most information and knowledge of your results, Web analytics is necessary.  Having solid feedback regarding your SEO and PPC marketing efforts will allow you to gage how successful your campaign is.  More traffic is only positive if the cost of the search ad relative to the conversion doesn’t reduce your bottom line.

SEO is a bit like a good public relations strategy; it helps to bring top of mind awareness to your site.  SEO gets them in the door, so you can complete the deal.