How SEO and Organic Traffic Go Hand-in-Hand

Your site needs more organic traffic.

That’s the traffic that stays with you. It’s always there … as long as you nurture it.

Organic traffic provides over 200X the ROI (return on investment) of other marketing efforts like Social media marketing, PPC (Pay per click) or traditional marketing alone.

On top of this, the mechanism that leads to organic traffic makes all of your traffic-generating efforts easier and more effective. That’s because you’re more visible to your target audience – at exactly the moment they’re looking for what you offer.

You know that SEO helps you increase organic traffic.

Your goal is to profit from incoming traffic to your site, whether that’s passive income like affiliate marketing or you’re actually selling a product or service.

You need to understand just how SEO drives organic traffic to your site to get the most out of your efforts.

Let’s explore how SEO and organic traffic work hand in hand.

What is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is traffic that flows naturally to your site. You don’t have to constantly work for it as you would with other marketing methods alone.

Organic traffic reaches your site through search engines.

When you utilize effective SEO to rank higher in search engines, visitors who just entered a search query click on your site.

Why?

Because it appears to match what they were searching for.

If properly monitored and managed, organic traffic builds with time.

When search engines like Google see that you’re getting organic traffic, they consider you to be “important.”

Importance in the search engine world means higher rankings because you’re more likely to deliver what searchers want.

Delivering what searchers want is a search engine’s ultimate objective. As long as you’re doing that, they’ll reward you with high rankings in the SERPs (search engine results page).

High rankings lead to more organic traffic.

What is SEO?

Put simply, SEO or search engine optimization is the term that includes all the methods you can use to ensure better search engine rankings.

There is both:

• on-page SEO which includes everything you can do on your website and on each post
• off-page SEO which includes things like link building or social media marketing

One other important point to remember is that SEO isn’t just about making your website search engine friendly. You should also think about your visitors and make your site user-friendly. The two go hand-in-hand!

The video below explains what SEO is and why you need it to improve your rankings and get more organic traffic.

How Does SEO Improve Organic Traffic?

SEO improves organic traffic by helping search engines know that you’re the one who has what customers are looking for and that you’re the best site to deliver it.

Search engines make this judgment based on several optimization factors, including but not limited to:

• Site speed
• User-friendliness
• Mobile-friendliness
• Importance of your site
• Relevance of your site
• Content seeming substantial, not just 300 words with several keywords thrown in
• Content appearing visual. The search engine can’t actually see your images but they know if you have images, videos or widgets on the page that improve user-experience
• Content including what the searcher is looking for, which is determined largely by actual keyword phrases, but is also dependent on context (the presence of related keywords)
• The existence of meta tags, which is code that helps search engines know what’s important on the page and affects what searchers see when they view your site in a search engine list
• Structured data, data that helps search engines better understand what each page is about

To this, you add user-determined optimization factors like:

• The time that visitors spend on the page
• Whether they click on something on the page

The object of SEO is to optimize your site in all of these areas to improve your SERP ranking to increase organic traffic.

Through SEO, you make your site more mobile-friendly, make your content more substantial, show search engines that you have what people are looking for, show that your site is important and so on.

You can use tools like Google Analytics and search engine ranking tools to measure how well the site is performing. You use the data obtained to make adjustments.

Laser Targeting Your Traffic

SEO doesn’t just drive random traffic to your site. It drives targeted traffic.

Why does this matter?

Let’s say you have an amazing blog on the topic of revolutionary healthcare tech geared toward medical professionals.

If somehow SEO were to send thousands of random search engine users to your site, would this be of any value to you?

What percentage of this random population of users actually care about this topic or would benefit from it?

SEO works differently

Because traffic generation is search engine based at a granular query level, only people who would be interested in revolutionary healthcare tech are likely to even see you.

This helps everyone get what they want.

The people who are looking for celebrity relationship news, get that. Those who want to know how to mail perishable goods receive those results.

SEO:

• Aligns your site with what people are looking for
• Makes sure search engines know that you’re exactly that target is looking for.

Being Visible At Precisely the Right Moment

SEO isn’t just about being in the right place. It’s about being there at the right time.

All people go through what’s called a buyer’s journey.

Basically, it includes:

• Identifying that you need something
• Learning more about a product/service
• Deciding which company is the best to provide that
• Deciding if now is the time to buy it
• Making the purchase or walking away

Effective SEO aligns with the buyer’s journey so that you’re there with exactly the right message at exactly the right point in the journey.

Creating Brand Awareness

The more visible you are in search engines, the more of the right people become aware of your brand.

According to research, it takes 8 or more touches with your brand before a person becomes a viable lead.

In other words, someone who may be interested in what you have to offer may see you on social, in search results and elsewhere 8 times before they actually think:

Hey, this is what I’m looking for.

Through SEO, you’ll rank higher in more searches generating more awareness of your existence with the customers that you’re trying to attract.

Why do people have to see you so many times before they act?

You’re filling their trust bank account or trust meter. Imagine that you’re filling a beaker, measuring cup other measuring devices that has benchmarks (fill lines) on it.

In theory, every time someone sees you, you reach the next fill line until you get to the top and they decide to check you out.

It goes something like this, progressing with each touchpoint.

1. They probably look right over you in the search because there is 0 brand recognition.
2. They subconsciously remember seeing you before, so you look familiar. But you’re new, so why should they trust you?
3. People are drawn to what looks familiar, so now they actually read your headline and description.
4. They’ve seen you around a few times now, so you must be an authority on the topic. They’ll check you out.

SEO helps you move through these brand awareness touch points faster to get the “I’ll check that out” stage.

Greater brand awareness leads to more traffic.

Supporting Your Marketing Efforts

If you’ve ever run a PPC campaign through a tool like Adwords or Social Media ads like Facebook, you know what happens.

You get a boost of traffic coming into your site. But you’re paying for every click.

And as soon as your campaign is over, the traffic stops.

That is if you don’t SEO your website.

SEO is about having a solid foundation.

You can lead people to your site with PPC. But if it’s not mobile friendly, it takes forever to load and it doesn’t really offer value to the customer’s life, that leads stops there.

They had a bad experience – or simply not the right experience – so they won’t be back.

But inversely, if SEO has made your site inviting, each lead is the potential to create a fan, who will be back. They will tell others.

Long-Term Results

Search Engine Optimization offers long-term results.

As mentioned above, PPC, social media marketing and other similar methods are very temporary.

They are very useful tools – don’t get me wrong – but if you haven’t built that strong foundation with SEO, then their results will be fleeting.

A properly SEO’d website will pay you back many times over a long period of time.

Low Maintenance Costs

SEO is not a one-time deal.

It does require ongoing maintenance to keep you optimized.

But after the initial investment of time or money or both, you can keep your site optimized with occasional, low-cost maintenance as long as that maintenance is done on a regular and uninterrupted basis.

Maintenance includes:

• Reevaluating the strategy and making changes
• Tracking what competition is doing
• Monitoring your rankings
• Keeping up to date on what your target audience is searching for on the internet and aligning your content with those searches
• Updating and generating fresh content
• Staying current on guidance from Google and other search engines
• Keeping your site running smoothly and quickly
• Evaluating how any site additions impact SEO – such as – does a new plugin slow down your site
• Repurpose underperforming content
• Monitoring your site health. Check for errors in Google Search Console or carry out an audit of your website.

Maximizing Profits

SEO reaches exactly the right target at exactly the right time, so you get greater impact out of every visit.

It creates additional touch points to improve brand awareness and reduce the time to build up your 8+ touches before your target acts.

SEO is the way to maximize profits from all of your online efforts. It lays a solid framework on which all other efforts can build and flourish.

It gets long-term results – unlike campaigns that get a lot of clicks over a short time, and generates traffic that never comes back without SEO.

SEO is a low maintenance strategy. Once you optimize your site,  you simply have to maintain what you’ve done to continue to reap the benefits.

Although you might be able to optimize your site quite quickly, at least the on-page factors, you might not see the results immediately. Sometimes you can see an improvement in rankings in a day and other times it will take a few months.

If you’re just starting and you would like to learn more about SEO and building an online business I recommend an online training platform that teaches you everything you need to know.

On the other hand, if you already have a website there are some good free resources online such as this article from Brian Dean. There are also multiple SEO courses on Udemy

If you have any questions or comments please let me know below.