Increase Branding with PPC Advertising

Why pay for traffic in search engines' paid listings, if you can achieve high organic rank - the gift that keeps on giving with traffic, leads, and sales?

First, to digress a bit and to speak to an area near and dear to our hearts, high organic rank isn't really free anymore.

With more and more business turning to online marketing, and in large part to search engine marketing, the competition for the first few listings of the search engine results is only growing. The sites ranking at the top of the results for competitive terms are paying in some way - either directly paying a search engine optimization/marketing company or paying with their own time and resources.
See our blog post "Search Engine Optimization: Not As Exciting As Magic" for much more on this topic.

But, now on to our main point:
Why would you need paid search advertising once you've achieved high organic search engine rank?

This article from BizReport takes a closer look at the question.

In "Drop PPC campaigns when organic performing?", BizReport presents the idea that to really own a page, you need to have a presence in both paid and organic listings. As many of us know all too well, if you don't have a presence, especially in the paid listings, you can be sure your competitors will.

Of course, testing is the only way to determine, for sure, if you'll receive more or less traffic with a presence in both the paid and organic listings. In our practice, though, we've seen PPC clicks on terms for which a company is ranking number one and clicks for the company's own name.
If your site hadn't received these clicks through PPC, who would have?

Another note - as search engine marketers or small business owners, we sometimes live and breath search engine results, but the average consumer doesn't. Often times, they don't realize there's a difference between the first sponsored listings at the top of the page and the first of the organic listings. To them, they start at the top of the results page and work down.
Of course, this view is declining as consumers become more accustomed to search engines, but there are definitely still consumers who don't see the difference.

At first thought, it seems logical to turn off your PPC campaigns when your organic rank increases. But with closer scrutiny - to increase your brand, own the search results, keep up with the competition, and cater to all customers - it seems the best solution may be to consistently have a presence in both paid and organic results.