What is Organic Search Marketing?
In the past decade, we've seen numerous examples both large and small of how the web can transform the fortunes of businesses both online and off. Using the power of the Internet to get discovered by a wide audience, failing companies have come back from the verge of bankruptcy. Small startups and fledgling firms have used the same method to increase their sales exponentially. How exactly have these success stories come about? Through a little thing called organic search marketing. It's one of the most reliably effective tools any business or entrepreneur can leverage to make E-commerce dreams become a reality.
Organic Search Marketing: Aim For The Top
Before we delve into what organic search marketing is, we should define what organic search results are. When you enter a query into the search box at Google, you'll get a list of results in large type in the center of the page. To the right, you'll see advertisements. The ads on the right are there because someone paid Google to put them there. The results in the center are completely organic. They're what Google deems to be the most relevant information pertaining to what you typed in as a search term. Organic search marketing aims to put your website as close to the top as possible for search terms related to your business that many people search for on a regular basis.
How Does It Work?
In order for organic search marketing to be effective, one has to first consider how people will go about searching for service providers and products related to your business. Search terms are key, in other words. If you're dominating the results for search terms that people rarely use, it won't do you much good. Nailing down which search terms actually matter is priority number one. Once you've done that, you can attack the problem of ranking highly for those valuable search keywords. And that's precisely where things start to get interesting. It's easy in principle, but a lot harder in practice.
Where To Begin
Search leaders like Google, Yahoo, and Bing will only put you at the top of their results if your site is seen by users as the top authority for any given area of expertise. As such, every major search engine values links to your website as much if not more so than the actual content. If a lot of other websites reference your web page in the context of the search terms entered by users, it means your site is an authority site. The name of the game is getting other websites to link to you organically. The best way to do that is to offer value, publish content that matters, and make your website the best source of information for a given topic on the web.
Proactive Organic Search Marketing
Every few months, Google and the other search engine giants like to throw a wrench into the works by switching up their formulas just a bit. The purpose of these sometimes subtle and occasionally major changes in the algorithms is to avoid being “gamed” by mercenary affiliate marketers and spam factories. The idea is sound in theory, but it tends to negatively impact legitimate businesses as well that have worked hard to earn their spot at the top of the search results. To make sure your business ranks where it should, organic search marketing requires constant effort.
