Many B&B owners who have relied on “natural” searches to bring them business via their website in the past but are now seeing traffic declining will not be surprised to hear this…

According to Larry Kim, founder of search engine marketing company WordStream, “The click-through rate of paid search advertisements on Google now outnumbers ‘free’ organic search result listings by nearly a 2:1 ratio for high commercial intent keyword searches…”

Investigating further, tech website www.inc.com points out the following: “When people are searching in order to investigate or make a purchase, over 64% click a sponsored result…unpaid clicks still account for the majority of Google search clicks, but if a keyword is valuable to a business, PPC advertisements typically generate double the number of clicks compared to organic results.”

Unsurprisingly, Google has responded to these developments with a number of new strategies, including making sure that paid ads for high commercial intent keywords (i.e. keywords that people type when they’re keen to buy a product or service) take up more and more of the results page, pushing ‘natural listings’ further down.

In the future, it looks as if small businesses (including B&Bs) will have to rely on social media (and perhaps flash sales) to increase their web visibility.

Read More: http://bit.ly/Q5meyh