Yes, Organic Search Rankings Are Important!

Getting views on the content you publish for your website isn’t exactly the easiest thing to accomplish. It’s really easy to throw money at paid advertising to bolster your impressions on your content marketing efforts, even if it does hurt to see a chunk of your marketing budget disappear.

But believe it or not, organic search rankings can help out your website traffic even more than paid advertising! Not to mention, it’s a cheaper way of going about marketing your site. Fueling the SEO machine is an important part of getting your content in front of your prospects’ eyes.

Organic search rankings are Google search results that appear on the first pages of results when you type in any search term. These results are based solely on algorithms, not advertising. You can tell which of your google results are paid for by the “sponsored” tag that appears by the title.

The distinction between promoted and organic is important, as they both accomplish different goals.

New to SEO? Here’s a quick video to give you the cliff notes on organic search rankings from Brian Dean:

Quick Takeaways:

• Search engine optimization for your content and overall website is crucial to building your organic search rankings

• Content marketing is a sustainable way to create new traffic to your website and draw new eyes to your new product, but you can boost your views with paid content marketing

• Creating your content with SEO practices in mind will boost your overall engagements online

Getting general

Let’s get some definitions out of the way so we’re all on the same page!

Traffic:

Your traffic is the number of users that view your page. You can obtain traffic data using google analytics, which can also show you exactly where your views are coming from.

Conversions:

You need more than just views. Is your reader clicking your article just to immediately exit the page? You need more interaction than that, like sharing the post or interacting with your product and service pages.

Your conversion rate is how many prospects are becoming customers, which should be your #1 priority.

SEO:

Source: WSI Proven Results

Remember, it’s not just the content itself, but how you write it out. Good SEO/SEM practices are everything. They are how you make sure your articles rank above your competitors when prospects are searching for information.

Some quick steps to improving your SEO rankings are:

• Modifying your URLs

• Utilizing keywords and keyword research in your content

• Designing your page for the most user-friendly experience

• Using different tools and software to make the process easier

An added bonus of using SEO tools is the ability to measure your progress through content marketing automation. We’ll come back to this concept later, but by utilizing distribution software you can ensure your content is performing optimally.

If SEO intimidates you, you can always hire writers that already have the know-how to do it for you. This practice can elevate your content overall, not just with search engine optimization.

By seeking the best writers for your staff or as a consultant, you can take all the guesswork out of proper content marketing.

Why are organic search rankings so important?

Organic search is for the prospects you haven’t made contact with yet. When they’re searching for general terms related to your product or service, it’s your aim to be one of the very first things they see on the page. It’s you or your competitors.

Source: Marketing Charts

For example, let’s say your startup sells grilling aprons. Creating content focused around keywords like recipes or grills will bring your target prospects (grillers) to your site. As they read your blog, they’ll realize “wow, I DO need a grilling apron for all this brisket I’m cooking!”

Some articles you’d write using this example would be:

The 15 Best Tools for your Grill

Top BBQ Recipes for the Summer

What Sauces are best for Grilling?

This isn’t just for selling products – the same idea applies to selling services too! If you’re trying to gain clients for say, your real estate business, some article ideas include:

What to Look For When Buying a House

10 Things First-Time Homeowners Get Wrong

Best Places to Live In (Your Area Here)

By creating content based around the things your prospects are interested in, you’re giving them a portal directly to your site.

Measuring your organic SEO rankings:

What’s the point of putting in all this effort if you can’t tell what’s working? When creating your content marketing process, you have to define your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Examples of KPIs include:

• Measuring how a content marketing campaign impacts your sales team’s productivity

• Understanding the percentage of customers that were marketing-generated and what business was earned from organic search

• Measuring hours of work put into content marketing for organic search vs money put into ad spending

KPIs are your benchmarks for success, and every other metric is what defines your KPIs.

Seeing how your organic search rankings are performing is crucial to a healthy digital marketing strategy. Luckily – there’s some B2B tools designed to help you analyze your key metrics and strategy like Mailchimp and Google Analytics.

Followers and engagements:

An easy metric to check out the success of your social media is how many followers you are gaining and how many times your posts are being engaged with.

You can check out what posts lead directly to a prospect or customer clicking through to your profile and clicking the follow button to stay up-to-date with your company.

Socialmediaexaminer.com says:

The number of social media followers you have matters because bigger numbers translate to higher levels of engagement and more traffic.

Followers aren’t everything though, engagement is! Engagement is any comment, like, or share that happens to one of your posts. Driving up engagement leads to social media platforms suggesting your content to their users.

Being on the front page of someone’s social media timeline is the golden goose of digital marketing. This is done through quality content appropriate to each platform and consistent monitoring of what is successful and what isn’t.

Conversion rates:

This metric is the real shining gem of your content marketing efforts! Again, converting prospects should be your number one goal with content marketing.

By figuring out what content does the best across what platforms, you can make better, more informed decisions on what media to spend the most time on.

Wrap up

Organic engagement isn’t always easy to build, and you might be tempted to cheat a little and strictly use paid advertising. What’s important to remember is that organic engagement works best in tandem with paid forms of advertising!

Keeping diverse methods of distribution will bring your clients in from every part of the web. Now that you have the knowhow, it’s time to work on building your organic search rankings!

Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weekly blog content service or schedule a free consultation.