Monday, April 27, 2020

Why Organic Traffic Beats Social and Paid

by Chris Reid The SEO cat and mouse game only intensifies further with Google pushing out over 500 algorithmic updates each year. The SEO guidelines of unique content, engaging articles, and good user experience are old school, and aren’t enough to rank sites now. It is quite common these days that most search engine optimizers give up trying to rank their sites and resort to paid traffic and social media to drive in visitors. But is this traffic as effective as organic traffic? What the Charts Say While paid traffic sources like Google AdWords and traffic from social media often offer perks such as the ability to quickly set up ad campaigns, and traffic without the hassles of SEO, they aren’t as effective as organic traffic. Statistics reveal that about 51% of all traffic to business websites comes from organic search, whereas paid search and social media deliver only 10% and 5% respectively. The reason behind this discrepancy lies within the customer mindset of the traffic from these sources. Why So? Organic traffic tends to be much more effective due to the simple fact that people prefer search engines at every end of their purchase journey, starting from investigation on a particular product to finally making the purchase. Social, on the other hand, is much more suited for connecting with people and promoting brand image even before the people decide whether they need the product. Hence, the relatively small share of social media in traffic is quite justified. While paid search offers webmasters the opportunity to have their webpages placed even above the worthy organic search results, they never tend to convert as well as the organic results due to the simple fact that users don’t trust the ads. While Google is putting in more and more effort to make the ads and organic results to look the same, an increasing number of users are getting to know that the paid results are inferior to the organic results. The Best Way to Go Webmasters need to perceive the significance of organic search and realize that users will always favor organic SERPs (search engine results pages) over social and paid SERPs. Social media exposure can be used more effectively when it is used to promote brand awareness rather than selling. Paid search is best used when it is in addition to SEO. When traffic starts flowing into the site, and popularity and reputation builds up, it is an indication to the search engines that the site is worth ranking. It is true that unique website content, effective content marketing, and good user experiencearen’tenough to land yourwebpages in the SERPs these days. But they are definitely the right way to go. Without these, it is almostguaranteedthat you will have poorconversion rates. Unique content andengaging articles will only catapult the speed of natural linking to the site, and as most SEOs agree, linking is half of the SEO game. Bundle that with the essentials on page optimization and ranking factors like user acceptance and regular content updates, then you’re already far ahead of 90% of those webmasters out there who just resort to paid search and social media advertising when they just can’t rank their sites. If you want to rank in Google, you must deserve to be ranked in Google.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.