How Organic Search Should Direct Your Content

While you might be thinking this headline should be flip-flopped, think again. Yes, your content ideally should impact your organic search by helping your site rank better in such searches. But, have you ever given thought to looking at things from the other way around? If someone comes to your site by way of an organic search, you need to make sure that your content compels them to stay. Does yours do that?

How Important is Organic Search?

A recent report published by Conductor indicates that as much as 64% of web traffic results from organic search. I don’t know about you but to me, that makes organic search extremely important. And, even more important is how well the content seen by this traffic performs.

Think of it this way—your SEO efforts succeeded enough to get you returned and seen in an organic search. Your meta data was good enough to make someone click through to your site. Now it is the job of your on-page content to keep the person with you.

How Can Your Content Maximize Organic Search Traffic?

There are really three components to how you can best utilize content to get the most out of organic search traffic (which, in case you’ve forgotten, accounts for the lion’s share of your visitors).

• Strong SEO

You could argue that this must come before all else. With weak search engine optimization, you could have very little traffic to begin with. You must create, implement and monitor a robust search engine optimization program. Think of it as fuel for the sales cycle engine.

• Optimized Content

This could technically be considered a component of SEO but its job is so specific that it warrants being called out on its own. Every piece of content you create should have appropriate meta data that helps to sell it in a way. Think of your own experiences on a search result page. The descriptions under each listing directly affect which one—if any—you choose to click on. Those few sentences have a big job to do.

• Outstanding Content

High-quality content creation should be a primary goal for your business. The quality of your content is also an SEO ranking factor insofar as search engines crawl your site to evaluate the richness and relevance of your content. However, content on its own must perform multiple jobs, including moving people along the sales cycle all the way to conversion.

It must be noted that content involves many things. It can be onsite copy for landing, product, service or home pages. It can be blogs or articles. It can be social media—including videos. There is no one-size-fits-all set of parameters that content fits into. Anything that communicates to your audience and helps them know how to engage with you can be considered content.

Perhaps the most important point for you to take away is that in order to most effectively capitalize on organic search traffic, you must consider all three of the elements above. Each one moves a prospect along to the next logical step in the customer journey. Overlooking any one of these can not only hurt you but potentially help your competitors.