What do you really know about the organic traffic that visits your website?
You may have a good understanding of the value of running paid as online but do you have the same understanding about your organic traffic?
- Do you know your best-ranking keywords?
- Do you know the size of the audience behind the keywords?
- Do you know the different words your customers use when looking for your product?
- Do you know which of your website pages drives the most organic traffic?
- Do you know your domain authority score and what this indicates about how likely you are to rank in SERPs?
Does your agency send you monthly SEO reports? If so, do you understand them?
Real SEO is not sending reports. Real SEO involves planned monthly activity both onsite and offsite with a specific keyword target in mind, and a timescale to achieve the target.
- Do you know which keywords you are targeting & why?
- Do you have a timescale to achieve your ranking targets?
- Are you clear on exactly what work is being created & what it will achieve?
- Do you know who your main competitors are online?
When was the last time your existing SEO agency created new website content or created a high-value backlink? If this isn’t happening every month, what “SEO” are you really paying for?
If you have a current SEO supplier and you’ve answered “No” to any of the questions above, you are in danger of treating SEO as a digital marketing “box ticking” exercise and this could be a costly mistake.
Why you should take SEO seriously
Organic traffic typically buys more “stuff” than paid traffic
Organic traffic is largely constituted by in-market customers. They’re actively ‘searching and researching’ ahead of buying something, and are generally ready to shop. A significant proportion of paid traffic, especially when scaling ad spend on demand-gen platforms like Meta and TikTok, is made up of colder audiences at the top of the funnel. They may not be in-market yet. You’re interrupting them and making them aware of your brand’s existence when they weren’t even looking. You are influencing them to discover your products at this point. This paid spend can, however, help drive organic traffic; once these customers become “in-market” they may search for your brand/products after being made aware of your existence through paid traffic. Especially if you’re nurturing these potential customers through retargeting campaigns, keeping your brand top-of-mind until they’re ready to make a purchase.
Organic rankings are [semi] permanent unlike paid ads
sure, your rankings can change but once you’ve earned your domain authority and rankings for your target keywords, as long as you don’t make any catastrophic technical blunders, you should largely be able to protect your position. If you turn spend down, or off, your ads disappear. That being said, paid media can help drive engagement with your website and products, and that will be reflected in your authority and rankings, so there is some residual value to paid marketing, as long as the traffic quality is good.
Good organic rankings improve conversion rates for paid ads
By increasing brand authority and organic rankings you’ll increase the visibility of your brand in relevant Google search results. Ultimately this means a higher portion of your traffic will be from in-market audiences who are actively searching for the products you sell. This helps fill your marketing funnel with higher-quality traffic; your blended ratio between paid and organic traffic will be better i.e. have more of the latter. This benefits your paid media campaigns in two ways:
- your retargeting campaigns will spend against ‘hotter’ in-market customers and not just retargeting slightly warmer cold audiences.
- your pixels and the ad platform algorithms that are being fed by the data from your tags are being “trained” by this stream of in-market traffic. Consequently, this improves the ad platform’s profiling of your customers and its understanding of the people most likely to buy your products. It helps make new customer targeting more effective and can help the ad platforms reach people who are more likely to be in-market.
Increased brand authority
Customers now inherently understand that rubbish companies don’t rank well in Google. How many times would you scroll to the bottom of page one, or click through to page two, in Google search results? You’d just type a different search term if you didn’t get what you wanted towards the top of page one.
A page one ranking in google indicates to potential customers that you are a trusted company selling quality products/services, with lots of happy customers
Want to find out your real organic position in Google?
All we need is analytics access and 24 hours. We’ll tell you your website’s SEO strengths and weaknesses, give you both short-term and longer-term SEO keyword targets, and tell you how to achieve them.
Armed with a clear understanding of your organic position and how to improve it, you can then decide the best way to implement it.
If you’d learn more about our SEO services please get in touch.