You are an expert in your industry, and you have a valuable message and product to offer. You know people will listen to what you have to say, and pay for your product; you just have to put yourself in front of the right crowd.
Organic search engine marketing offers the perfect opportunity to do just that. Only trouble is, organic search is becoming more and more like a competitive sport these days, as restrictions increase and paid search expands.
But with a little planning and the right strategy, you can still grow your web presence organically to draw in the?customers who are looking for your message and your product.
1. Know Your Audience
Your content should be geared towards your audience’s interests and level of knowledge. Do some research to find out what your audience is typing into search engines, what keywords are bringing them to your site, and what pages they first hit when they land on your website.
Then create content that is relevant to what they are searching. What are they hoping to learn about your product or service? What words are they using? Avoid the pitfall of using too much industry jargon. The average person will not be searching for these terms, so your content should meet your audience where they are, and inform.
2. Create Quality Content
Quality content is not only clean and up-to-date; it shows that you are an expert in your field, and conveys your authority to inform an audience. Content that is overly “salesy” ranks poorly in organic search engine marketing.
Offer your audience something beyond what you’re trying to sell them. Give them useful information to establish yourself as a reputable source, and keep them coming back to you.
3. Optimize Content For Search Engine Visibility
You have the content and a target audience – but without optimized content, all of that is nothing. Ideally, a couple things should be in place before optimizing content. For starters, everyone on a marketing team should know how to optimize content for the best visibility. Additionally, your CMS should allow search engines to crawl your content with ease, and it should allow staff to make content changes quickly and easily so your content is always fresh and up-to-date.
Next, insert your tags. This includes:
- Title tags
- Header tags
- Meta tags
- Image tags
Also take note of your page URLs – do they correlate to what people are searching? Avoid duplicate content; search engines automatically lower your ranking if you have content copied from other web pages.
Examine mobile-friendliness, as mCommerce is growing drastically from year to year. And finally, how long does it take for your page to load? Slow-loading pages not only tend to get lower rankings, but they are frustrating for the viewer – and cause them to bounce faster.
4. Distribution
To reach your target audience organically, you should know where they hang out online. You can check Twitter mentions and Facebook shares to get some sense of this. Overtime, see where your content is performing well, and be sure to write your content appropriately for the channel.
What you post on LinkedIn is not the same as what you post on Facebook; tailor your message based on who’s listening, so you can build your community and focus on the customer. Do they like data? Graphs? Each channel should offer something original, custom-created for that audience.
You can always include links to the content you’ve worked hardest to create. After all, your goal is to bring them closer to converting – in as few steps as possible, of course.
How is your organic search engine marketing performing? Improve your visibility today with Sweet Rose Studios!
