Generating traffic to your homepage or digital storefront is vital to achieving digital marketing goals. Besides paid advertising, one of the most powerful ways to find customers is by making sure your business and products can be found when a potential customer searches the internet. Companies can offer to pay for the traffic from search engines when Internet users use specific keywords to look for product or service. They can also try to ensure that their websites are listed near the top of the natural or organic search result page through Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. In this lesson, I will focus on building high-quality organic search traffic through SEO and its conversion. First, let's take a closer look at how Google Search works. Search Engine Result Pages typically contains two types of content, organic and paid results. Organic results are listing of webpages selected and ranked by the search engines algorithm. Paid results are those that have been paid to be displayed by an advertiser. Even with the same set of keywords, organic search results are in constant flux, affected by many factors. Major search engines like Google, also change the design of their searches frequently to offer their users a more intuitive and responsive experience. You should regularly monitor how and where your webpage will appear on SERP and make adjustments accordingly. An important measure of success in Internet-based marketing is click-through rate or CTR. In paperclip advertising campaigns, CTR is the number of clicks advertisers receive on their ads per the total times this ad is shown. For example, if A people clicked on a search ad shown 100 times, the CTR is eight percent. For unpaid search traffic, organic CTR is the percentage of searchers who clicked on a search result. Its interpretation is largely based on the ranking position of a webpage against a set of keywords. For example, if your webpage is ranked at number 5 for a keyword that 100 people use to search in a month and five people clicked on this result, then your organic CTR is five percent. Theoretically speaking, an improvement of CTR would generate more traffic to your web pages regardless of its ranking. If you maintained the fifth rank, but improved the CTR from five percent to 10 percent from the last example, you just doubled your traffic. In practice, however, the search result rank directly and significantly impacts CTR. Research has shown that where information is displayed on a webpage can affect its chance of being seen. For example, most visitors of an English webpage will start eye gaze from top left corner and scan from left to right and top to bottom. This means that information displayed near the bottom of a webpage is less likely to be noticed. In web search, a highly ranked results listed at the top of the organic search results, also implies high quality and high relevance, and therefore is more trustworthy. Consumers are far more likely to click on these links for more information. Here's the organic CTR trend of the top 20 desktop Google search results in the US in March of 2021. You'll notice that the CTR rate of the number one ranked a search result is 30 percent. It drops to 12 percent for the second ranked result, and then quickly diminishes as we move down the list. The CTR rate of the 10th rank is only around one percent. Keep in mind that being ranked 10th out of hundreds of millions of search results is by no means poor performance. But the traffic it can generate is exponentially less than a top ranked position, whether it is paid or organic. The key to search engine optimization is finding the set of keywords and phrases relevant to your target consumers, search, interest and habits. Search engine optimization encounters two obstacles. The first is technical. You must remove the technical barriers that prevent the search engine crawlers from accessing, indexing, and displaying your web page on the SERP. The second obstacle, is the competitive market environment. You must recognize that millions of websites are competing for a few top spots on a SERP. A search marketer must stay current and closely monitor the ever-changing market conditions by looking at internal, external, and competitive factors. Let's take a look at a few important strategies in SEO. The first is to ensure that your site is submitted to the search engine and properly indexed. If you are developing a site with a new domain name or recently revamped your site, a good starting point is to verify and update this information on Google Search Console. It is recommended that automated submission tools are not used in this process because they can be considered a search engine spamming technique and affect a ranking. If you perform SEO on a site with links from other sites already crowd by a search engine, many search engines will automatically index it without submitting a new URL. Therefore, when you launch a new campaign, it is better to make the new campaign pages part of an existing site already correctly indexed. Once your site is visible to the search engine, is time to find the right combination of keywords and improve your SERP ranking. The keywords that drive customers to your site are crucial in SEO. You must find the right keywords and phrases or risk spending time and money driving the wrong people to your website. Many businesses default to keywords that contain their brand name and unique specific products. This can lead to poor SEO results. Let's use a hypothetical scenario to illustrate this point. Let's say you run an organic farm called Bumblebee with a domain name, bumblebeeorganicfarm.com. It sells a variety of organic food products online. The farm is open to the public for weekend tours and events. You also have an educational blog on organic farming. The most obvious set of keywords would be Bumblebee, organic, and farm. Well, but here's the problem. All three of these keywords are very common when used alone. You're farm will not be ranked high on a search with these keywords. You can combine them in a variety of ways, such as Bumblebee farm, organic farm, Bumblebee organic, Bumblebee organic farm. However, any combination with the words Bumblebee, maybe too specific to bring new leads because those who search your farm with Bumblebee farm as the keyword, already know your brand. These leads may come from your other marketing activities, such as billboards, TV commercials, and word of mouth. You have not realized the full potential of search marketing as a powerful inbound marketing touchpoint. However, if you don't include the word Bumblebee as a keyword, you might be competing for attention with hundreds of other organic farms on the web. You can look at Google Analytics to see what words your visitors use to find you. But if you have low traffic to the website from search engines, the data won't give you the insights needed to improve your SEO, so what is the solution? The mistake in this case is optimizing your site based on the keywords you want people to use, not the ones people actually use to search for your product and services. Let's look at the problem from a different angle by asking the following set of questions. What are your marketing goals? Who do you want to attract from the search engines? What are they like? Where do they live? What do you want them to see once they land on your website? What do you want them to do on your site? Let's say you want to generate new leads who recently took an interest in buying organic foods online directly from a family farm, but have not yet found a trustworthy source. Since you have a niche business with a relatively low brand recognition beyond the local market, generic, or products specific keywords may not yield good results because you will be competing with more prominent brands and major online retailers for the top spots on the search. A better strategy would be to bring the organic search traffic to your highly engaging and educational blog, collect contact information through subscription, build trust, and then convert the interested readers to make a purchase. To achieve this goal, you'll need to optimize the block section of your website with keywords and phrases used by those seeking information about organic foods and farm-to-your-own-kitchen lifestyle. From here, you have many choices to develop an initial set of keywords. You can generate a list of questions and issues these customers might have through empathy and perspective taking. You can conduct focus groups among your existing customers. You can identify and research the other media and information outlet that a prospect might use to find the information. For example, you might identify your target customer as health and environmentally conscious millennials living in a metropolitan area. They are avid New York Times readers. If so, you should be looking for recent articles on New York Times on organic foods and organic farming. You will look for buzzwords and trending terms that were cited in these articles. These words might give you insights into the keywords your prospect may use to search for related information. There are also many keyword analytics tools and services to help you discover exactly how your prospects are searching for businesses like yours. I'll list some of them in the additional resource section of this course. The strategy and the planning process of SEO are much like those of any other marketing campaigns. Only after you developed a clear strategy and identify the right set of keywords and phrases, the technical aspect of SEO can yield good results. As there are many free and excellent educational resources on the mechanics of SEO, I will not dive deep here. In the next lesson, I will cover a few essential steps in SEO to give you a primer. But you should check out the additional learning resources section for more information on the topic. I'd also highly recommend interested students to visit Google's Skillshop and explore its training courses. While you dive deeper into these technical aspects of search marketing, always keep in mind that SEO is as much of a game of strategy as it is about technology. It involves creative problem-solving, sustained effort, and an adaptive mindset. It requires a holistic view of your business goals and marketing goals, and a deep understanding of consumer preferences and behavior. You should also develop different sets of keywords for different campaigns to drive different kinds of traffic to different parts of your website.
