What is Organic Traffic in Digital Marketing
What is organic traffic?
“Organic traffic refers to visits that come to your site via unpaid (i.e., “organic”) search results. Meaning it’s search engine traffic you get for free—aside from what it costs to create and maintain the content.”
It’s important to touch on the opposite of organic marketing to really get a good understanding! The opposite is, paid marketing or advertising.
“Paid marketing is the process of using paid advertising channels to target potential customers online. This involves running paid or sponsored advertisements across different channels to directly drive sales rather than just improve online visibility.”
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In this post we are going to be talking about organic traffic in reference to Search Engines.
For example, your Website + Blog, Pinterest, YouTube. You can get organic traffic on social media as well but that won’t be our focus for this post. I want to talk about highly valuable content that comes from long form content creation!
I am a huge fan of organic marketing! For a few reasons:
- Long-term results: Organic traffic builds over time, like a snowball effect. Once your content starts to pick up traction it will just continue to grow. This means that even 2 or 3 (maybe even more) years down the road, a single piece of content you made will still bring you traffic.
- Sustainability: Once your content starts to rank in search engine results it will continue to rank. You may have to pop in and update certain posts to ensure they stay relevant. But aside from that, you can rest easy knowing the content you spent so much time and effort on will continue to attract clients/buyers.
- Attracting your ideal clients: With long form content you are solving a specific problem with each piece of content. You are talking directly to your ideal client and giving them the answers they are searching for. Think about it, when they Google something, the posts that show in search results are directy related to their search query.
- Opportunity to scale: As mentioned above, organic traffic grows over time. Bringing more eyeballs to your content. If you are consistently posting organic content and driving traffic to your Website, Blog, Pinterest or YouTube channel your audience will continue to grow. This is mass marketing where you have the potential to reach hundreds of thousands, even millions of people. You can leverage this audience to scale with passive income.
- Low cost: It doesn’t take very much $ to start organic marketing. You just need to pick a platform, one of which we’ve already touched on (Website + Blog, Pinterest, YouTube, Podcast, etc.). And start creating your long form content. Building organic traffic is free!
Now, how would I truly be helping you if I wasn’t sharing the down side of organic marketing?
- Time investment: Building organic traffic takes time! And I don’t mean a few days, I mean many months and maybe even a year! It will take time for you to start seeing consistent traffic roll in. But when it does, it will only continue to grow from there!
- Search engine algorithms: Just like social media platforms, search engines have their own algorithms. Which you do want to pay attention to because they can affect your rankings.
- Seasonality: Depending on your business or what your niche is, your traffic can fluctuate based on seasons. For example, if you have a sports blog about Football, you might not be getting as much traffic outside of the Football season.
How can you use organic traffic to grow your business?
The number one thing you need to do in order to successfuly grow your business with organic trafffic:
Decide to do it!
I know that seems so simple, but honestly, just make the decision. It’s important to truly decide you want to do it and then stick to that decision! Make it a non-negotiable. Because trust me, It’s not going to be easy! It can seem very exciting in the beginning because you see the potential and you know it’s going to pay off tenfold. But when you are 6 months in and you haven’t made a single dollar from your long-form content, you might want to give up! I’m here to tell you, please don’t! It really will pay off it just takes time! Which is that hardest thing to wrap your mind around because we are so used to instant results. But those long-term results will be oh so worth it my friend!
Actionable steps you can take to get started with long form content marketing
Decide on a platform.
Decide where you want to create your long form content. Remember long form, highly valuable content is what you need to create in order to increase your organic traffic!
- Website + Blog: I pair these together because you should have an SEO optimized website with your blog. And if you have an SEO optimized website you should blog to bring even more traffic to your website! This strategy is for you if you enjoy writing. Or maybe you’re an introvert who doesn’t want to show up on camera or in person to network!
- Pinterest: This is a great option if you have products or services you can visually sell. For instance, I am a website designer and I can showcase my designs on Pinterest! Not to overwhelm you, but this also pairs perfectly with your Blogging strategy. Pinterest is a great way to drive traffic to your blog!
- YouTube: If you love showing up on camera and chatting directly to your audience, then why not start a YouTube channel? This is a great option because it lets your audience truly get to know you and build a relationship. Video is king right now and YouTube is the place to show up if you want to grow your biz with organic traffic!
Invest in SEO
I know I said that organic traffic is cost effective because it’s FREE! Which it is, technically. Creating your content is free but I do highly recommend investing in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You can either invest financially but hiring an SEO expert or you can learn simple strategies yourself. Either way, you need to have some SEO knowledge if you’re going to venture down building organic traffic. Because it’s all based on SEO, you can’t get around that.
Why is SEO important when creating content to rank in search results? We have already determined that our content can get infront of people who are actively searching for the thing you do/sell. When someone types in a search query on Google (or any of the other platforms we mentioned), the platform serves the user with the results that match that search query best. But what if you are creating content that no one is searching for? Then you will really feel like you’ve wasted your time, you’ll stop trusting organic traffic (and me!), and it will just feel crappy!
Let’s get ahead of this heartache and make sure you are spending your time creating content that is actually being searched for. This is where SEO comes in! You’re discovering what your ideal clients are actually searching for and you are using their exact search terms and phrases in your content!
Consistently create long form, highly valuable content
If there’s one thing you take away from this post, I really hope you do take away more than that. But if you had to pick, pick this! Stay consistent with your content posting schedule! Okay fine, also please take away that you need SEO and without it you might just be throwing spaghetti at the wall!
Be honest and realistic with yourself. I know in the beginning it can feel like you can do it all. The adrenaline is rushin’ and you know you can do whatever it takes to make it happen! And I do believe that you can. But the reality for all of us is, life. Life happens! Really truly think about what you can consistently do long-term. If you can only post one long form piece of content once a month, then do that. If you can do it twice a week, weekly or bi-weekly, then do that. Pick what feels best for you and your lifestyle.
What I don’t want you to do is post 4 pieces of content a week then ignore the platform for 2 weeks and post again. Make sure you’re posting regularly. This builds trust with the search engine and they will award you over time.
Conclusion
Organic marketing is really truly going to be your best friend in the long-term. In the short-term, it wil probably be that friend who doesn’t make an effort. You know the one you always reach out to but they are never the ones to take initiative? Yeah, it might feel like that for the first year. But after that, you will become best friends and she will always be there for you!
If you are ready to start your organic marketing journey but need some support. Book in a free consultation to chat! I’m a Website Designer and SEO Strategist. I will not say I can help you on any and all platforms, because I simply am not a pro at them all. But if you do want an SEO optimized website and want to grow your business with a blog, I’m your gal!
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