Will Paid or Organic Traffic Generate More Leads?
When it comes to search engines, organic and paid traffic are not new things. These two tactics have been around for years and have remained largely unchanged.
Recent changes will impact the way organic and paid searches affect the traffic and conversion businesses gain from their search engine optimization (SEO) strategies.
These changes include Google’s preference for mobile-first, their removal of right rail ads, and an additional fourth paid listing that gets listed above the organic results.
Because of some of these changes, there will never be anything above the fold that isn’t paid advertising, meaning that users will need to scroll down to get their organic results.
Here at Above the Fold Media, we deeply understand this – after all, it’s where we get our name!
The Difference Between Organic and Paid
In general, much of your digital marketing efforts are about getting your business and services in front of a wider (while targeted) audience.
It’s about making sure that people that would want your services can find you and that people who wouldn’t necessarily look for you – but could benefit from your services and may buy – can find you. This gets you in front of the most people and helps you get results.
Organic Results
When it comes to digital marketing and trying to rank in search engines, there are two major tactics to rank high: organic and paid.
Organic tactics involve creating natural traffic and loyalty through search engine optimization (SEO) that gets you organically ranked in SERPs.
These services don’t ‘cost’ you anything aside from your time and efforts. You do not pay for the ranking spot, it is generated naturally.
Organic search is important because it gets you ranked within search queries and makes sure that you are found by potential customers.
Unlike paid search, organic results will give you long-term results that build strong brand recognition and search rankings. This will help increase your ratings, engagement, and overall business performance.
Paid Results
Paid tactics for your search engine marketing can offer incredible results if used properly. Like you’d expect, this involves drawing traffic through paid advertising, in which rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs) is gained through purchasing top spots.
By paying for SERPs higher than the organic rankings, you ensure that you are seen by a wide amount of people and that you are in the first results drawn.
This paid advertising gives you top results in the SERPs so that your business can be noticed. Although this gets you noticed by the most amount of people, it is not as consistent over time.
It is relatively immediate and short-term, although widening your net and potentially drawing in more customers in the process.
How to Tackle Organic and Paid Search in 2017
While this is fairly straight-forward in theory, applying it to your business in practice is much more difficult.
In order to use paid and organic search to your best advantage, we have a number of tactics that will help you in the new year:
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Increased Importance of Paid Search
In the coming years, there are major changes to paid search. With the rising use of mobile devices, mobile pages are more frequently the way people engage with content.
When it comes to searching online, paid search takes up most of the screen, and therefore will have more of a pull than ever. It will be important for considering this as you use paid search moving forward.
Similarly, it’s important to know while moving forward with organic. You may see some loss in results to the paid advertisers, but you will see this balance out with effective use of SEO and the improved functionality of Google’s Panda algorithm, which focuses on quality content.
As these get better at producing results for their users, they will make your organic results more valuable, especially against paid results.
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Diversify Your Content and Searchability
As search engines get better, they change in their functionality and accuracy. As the dynamics of search engines change, businesses must also change and adapt.
If you can adapt and adjust to how the search engines function, you will be sure to continuously rank in the search engines and gain quality authority and SERP results.
With all of the new, interesting, and unique types of content that can show up – and even top – SERPs, it’s important to be aware of the current trends and make sure you target these methods.
By creating content to rank for the knowledge graph, local listings, and more, you can make sure to claim top spots in the SERPs and gain unrivaled traffic.
Overall, make sure you are creative, adaptive, and flexible when it comes to providing and producing content that answers the queries your users have. Stand out, help users, and rank in the search results!
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Don’t Use Paid Search as Click-Bait
One of the biggest pitfalls to avoid when using a paid search strategy is to simply use it as click-bait. Although it is essentially designed to make sure that people click your results above others, without a targeted approach, this will fail to gain you the substantial traffic you want.
Instead, you want to use paid search effectively as part of your overall strategy in order to bolster your traffic and conversions.
Without focusing on the proper market to gain loyal customers that will convert and increase your ROI, you’ll increase traffic that will bounce fast.
This will actually decrease the authority of your site rather than support it, causing you to lose your SEO potential. Instead, establish a solid organic strategy and use paid advertising strategically to improve your click-through-rate and conversions.
This is the best way to get related and relevant traffic which leads to reliable, loyal, and converting customers. If you use a targeted approach and time your paid advertising with times when your service is important and valuable, you’ll help boost your sales and make sure you gain loyal customers along the way.
Adjusting to the Moving Fold
In our experience at Above the Fold Media, we’ve found a combination of organic and paid search tactics will achieve the best results for your business.
By using a consistently strong organic strategy and integrating paid tactics, you can make sure that you bolster your overall marketing strategy and gain substantial results.
By using each effectively for their purpose to achieve the same goal, you will get the best results possible.
At their core, they do different things: organic produces long-term, natural presence and bolsters your credibility; paid search expands your exposure, ranks you in the top results, and gives you a targeted reach.
Here at Above the Fold Media, we offer a full and comprehensive service to meet all of the needs you have. We’ll help offer consultation, advice, and services to help you use organic and paid search tactics to your best advantage.
For more information about this topic and how we can help you grow your business through innovative digital marketing strategies, give us a call at 416-477-1862 or send an email to david@abovethefoldmedia.com!