Organic Is Healthy

Search engine traffic determines how many people visit our website. And this has a direct impact on online sales and overall business profitability.

A Search Engine Journal study showed that 93% of web traffic goes through a search engine. Furthermore, Smart Insights shows how 68% of all clicks for a search query go to the first five organic results. By comparison, results six to ten on the first page account for less than 4% of clicks. But how can a brand get to the top?

Paid vs. Organic

The quick way to get to the top of the search engine results for your target searches is to pay. But paying for ads can quickly get expensive. Organic search is touted as a way to reduce the cost of getting to the top of search results. It is also more effective – especially for B2B firms. According to Search Engine Land, organic search traffic accounts for 73% of all traffic to business services sites.

The statistics clearly point to the importance of investing in organic content and attracting organic traffic to your site. Here’s how you can ensure that you are producing good organic content that will benefit your brand and your affiliate marketing partners:

1. Stay relevant

Good organic content needs to address your customers’ concerns and be closely aligned with your overall brand promise. There’s no point creating good organic content if it isn’t related to what you’re trying to sell or promote. By making sure the content you produce dovetails neatly with your brand promise, you are also making sure that when visitors click through to your website, they aren’t disappointed and are enticed to buy.

2. Make it original and shareable

For your content to rank highly in search engines, you need to follow the search engine’s rules. The number one rule? Make sure your content is original. When SEO experts Moz researched “million-dollar content” (the answer box results that rank at the top for keywords and that drives millions of dollars in traffic), it found that the best organic content is on-point, bold, fresh, linkable and sharable. Go big and bold with your content to make it stand out from the crowd.

3. Follow SEO principles

While your content should be original, your approach should not be: make sure you adhere to well-established SEO principles. These are published by the search engines themselves. Google’s guidance is probably most important since, according to Smart Insights’ January 2020 data, it accounts for around 73% of desktop searches and 93% of mobile searches. This includes the need to optimise your content with header tags, meta tags, image tags, text for navigation, sensible use of reputable links, standard image formats, good indexing and structure, as well as ensuring the site is mobile-friendly. These housekeeping tasks always need to complement your fresh, original content because, ultimately, it is the quality and originality of your content that counts – both for search engines and users.