SEO, organic search are the big winners
What time is the Super Bowl? In 2011, this simple Google query was the play that led a savvy Huffington Post editor to score the “most legendary act of SEO trolling ever” and rocket his story on the kickoff to the No. 1 spot on Google’s search results page.
Google’s gotten a lot smarter about SEO trolling since that day, frustrating crafty marketers everywhere. But the story carries a lesson that can’t be denied.
If you want any chance of anyone finding you, your company or your cause, you’ve got to ramp up your SEO and organic search game. Key word here: Organic. You put in the hard work, but it’s free.
Google is such a part of our lives it’s become a verb. If you want to buy something, you go to Amazon. For anything else it’s Google, and that’s why it holds a whopping 91.75% of the worldwide search engine market; Bing has 2.75%.
Anytime a person asks Google a question that’s relevant to your website, you want them to see your result and choose it. Plus, as companies from Facebook to Apple keep moving the goalposts with privacy policies that make it harder and more expensive to target your audience, organic search is going to be the one safe play for staying in the digital game.
Not convinced? Let me shout it:
53% of all trackable website traffic comes from organic search.
Much like the Super Bowl, though, there’s no trophy for second place. If you aren’t near the top of the listed results on the first page, forget about it.
The first organic result in Google search has an average click-thru rate of 28.5%. For the second and third positions, that rate falls to 15% and 11%, respectively. The lowly 10th position sees only a 2.5% rate.
In the U.S. alone, Google handles 40 billion to 60 billion searches a month.
Still ignoring SEO? That’s a whole lot of people not hearing about you.
Improve your SEO game plan
Refresh your playbook – Update and expand the content on your website. Stale content won’t attract an audience. Plus, new content gives you the ability to expand your keywords.
Keep them in their seats – How engaging and useful is the content on your site? Google monitors how long visitors are on your site. If users are pogo-sticking – clicking on a search result, visiting your site, then immediately returning to Google’s search results to go to the next listing or change their search query – you’ll lose your popularity in the rankings.
- Make the fans happy – A mobile-friendly website generally will outrank one that works well only on a computer. More than half of all internet users worldwide are on mobile devices and tablets.
- Study the scouting reports – The SEO landscape is shifting constantly. A large part of an SEO expert’s job is to keep tabs on it through industry publications, blogs and even by following Google employees’ social media accounts.
- Hang with the winners – Links, from other websites and those within your own site, are like popularity votes for high-quality content. But beware of their quality. For example, a New York Times link carries more SEO value than one from johnqpublic.com.
You may not be able to troll your way to a win with Google search, but a successful SEO strategy will make you feel like you’ve won the marketing Super Bowl.
