Importance of Natural Rankings

Paid search can be a useful tool for many businesses. The frustration for me is that I often hear praises sung regarding paid placement, completely ignoring the authority that comes with natural placement. Natural search engine ranking is incredibly important for success because of the trust factor. Google works hard to provide good search results and because it does so many people choose to use it. This means that users trust Google and therefore trust you (to some extent) if they find you through a search term.

A study performed by Iprospect showed that 72.3% of users found natural searches to be most relevant. A later study showed that 60-70% of users trusted natural rankings, as opposed to 30-40% of users that trust paid search results. These numbers speak for themselves, 7 out of 10 people would rather click on a natural search result as opposed to a paid result. Now I ask you,

Whats is trust worth?