If you’ve been following our blogs, or happen to be one of our digital marketing clients, you undoubtedly have heard us sing the praises of marketing for organic search rather than simply going the path of paid search advertising. Despite having written about it so much, we still see a lot of confusion out there about what exactly organic search marketing is, why it is so beneficial to your bottom line, and why it takes a lot of patience to see this particular digital marketing strategy bear the abundant fruit it can bring.
So let’s get into it!
What is Exactly is Organic Search Marketing?
Often misconstrued with search engine optimization (SEO), organic search marketing actually covers a much broader array of skill sets and often combines the talents of SEO experts, content specialists, analytics experts, and even web developers.
While SEO is all about optimizing web pages to place highly for key industry search results, organic search marketing is aimed at finding hyper specific search terms that can be targeted with carefully crafted content to reach potential customers with a need that the competition has missed.
Basically, people express needs and wants in different ways via their search queries. Organic search marketing explores and assesses those various search queries potential customers make and then provides answers to target those queries. Rather than having a website show high in search results for only a handful of search queries, organic search marketing creates a huge footprint of high-ranking search queries, not only strengthening the website’s authority in the eyes of Google, but bringing in far more traffic to boot!
The Many Advantages of Organic Search Marketing
- Search Authority – As mentioned above, a website that best answers the most search queries in a related namespace is given the highest authority – and the most visibility in search.
- The Trust of Potential Clients – If you provide answers, advice, or direction to someone in need, you will most likely be thought of as trustworthy when that person needs to spend money for your product or service.
- Lasting Results – Unlike any paid advertising options which simply stop when the money stops being spent, organic search marketing is more like a business investment. Money spent on targeting a specific search query not only continues to serve the business long after it has been paid for, but the traffic results can actually grow as the content ages and other search queries are targeted, helping the overall website authority.
- Greater ROI – Truly, when it comes to digital marketing, nothing comes close to organic search marketing in regards to a low cost. As mentioned above, it is more like an investment which keeps paying dividends long into the future.
The One Big Disadvantage to Organic Search Marketing
And now for the elephant in the room and why so many businesses give up on organic search marketing and end up going back to expensive paid advertising – organic search marketing can take months to start showing results and often a full year before the full realization of the strategy’s effectiveness is clear.
Often, a business starts slowly growing and expanding over time without realizing that a major contributor to the success was the investment in organic search marketing working away in the background, placing the business’s website high in the search results for an increasingly wider array of valuable search terms. This ‘long game’ approach is indeed much like building a business (it basically is building a business on the web) where patience is everything and investments are always better than monthly costs that provide no long-term benefits.
If the long-term commitment of organic search marketing worries you, a competent organic search marketing team should be able to work with your budget and help you come up with a plan that serves both your short- and long-term marketing needs – usually with a mixture of paid advertising and organic search marketing.
Is Organic Search Marketing Right for Your Business?
Most business owners see their website as a way to tell the world about their business. Organic search marketing, however, flips the script by turning the website into a valuable resource for potential customers in need. If this sounds like it would be beneficial for your business, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!
