Earlier this month numbers became available for search engine company performances in the second quarter of the year. While the money Google, Yahoo, MSN and others made might not be of interest to you, if you are active in the CPC (cost per click) business for your web site, it should be. Google changed its strategy and processes in Adwords earlier this year, and the second quarter performance was the first indicator following those changes.

In case you missed the news, Google has dropped the number of advertisements it will place on a search results page. The average number of ads per keyword shown on Google in the US has declined from 6.5 to 4.0, a nearly 40% drop. That could reflect on our poor economic environment at the moment, but it’s more likely the result of Google’s ongoing efforts to improve the quality of its ads. The theory is not dissimilar to the evolution of search results over the past five years.

Remember a time when Google and Yahoo took great pride in telling you, at the top of your search results page, that it had just presented you with 3,700,000 results for your search? Did you notice how over time that number dropped significantly? It was not because there were fewer web sites – on the contrary, as that number now is well over 110 million. Rather, it was each search engine’s effort to present a higher quality of results, results that were deemed to be more relevant to the search.

It’s the same philosophy Google is employing with its new practice of presenting fewer advertisements in its Adwords program. Google believes it will place more pressure on advertisers to prepare a higher quality advertisement and landing page for the chosen keyword, thus making the sponsored results more relevant to the searcher.

What about money, you ask? Fewer advertisements placed in the Sponsored Results space would mean lower revenues, you say? Google doesn’t think so, and in fact Google believes that because the results will be arguably more relevant to the search, an advertiser’s conversion rate will be better, and therefor would justify higher bid prices. Conversion rate refers to the number of clicks it takes to generate one transaction – - whatever that most desired response might be, whether a sale, a telephone call, a contact form submission, an email address. The quality scoring Google employs in the advertisement and the landing page is something those who have a CPC campaign underway (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing) will need to watch closely.

As for those of us who concentrate on web copy writing and search engine optimization for better organic rank, it means the same thing. It will be important to monitor changes as they occur and their effects on both the paid and the organic results as Google strives to provide the better results they’re targeting through paid search now but at the same time improve their revenue.

There’s one other point worth mentioning here, and that is how one views sponsored results vs. SEO. In earlier columns, I’ve recommended SEO over sponsored results when a web site owner has to choose just one. Sponsored results should be viewed as a temporary means of promoting your web site, and not a permanent solution. The reason is a pretty simple one: once your web site has achieved a good organic rank, it becomes less necessary to spend money on a CPC campaign. So, temporary in the sense that it might be necessary only until you’ve made it to the top 20, or better still, to the top 10 on your Google and Yahoo.

The thing about bought traffic (your CPC campaign) is that it stops when you stop buying it. However, when you’ve become ranked well organically as a result of your SEO efforts, that traffic just keeps coming, or at least it keeps coming so long as you maintain the practices that got you ranked well in the first place.