To add some anecdotal data, even when our company was at #1 for our main search phrase and when there were fewer PPC competitors, we were still getting more tra

To add some anecdotal data, even when our company was at #1 for our main search phrase and when there were fewer PPC competitors, we were still getting more traffic with PPC + organic, rather than leaving it just to the organic listing. It's like there were 2 different sets of people - those who tend to click on ads and those who tend to click on organic results. And you want both. That was quite a long time ago. Nowadays, for our main search phrase, there are 4 PPC ads at this time. And Google is now blending ads much better with the organic results, they are barely distinguishable to the untrained eye. Being #1 organic result doesn't bring you that much benefit in that setup, you're actually being #5 overall - barely visible.