On The Other Hand

When you think about all the ways a visitor can find his or her way to your website, it’s a bit dizzying. There’s direct search, organic search, paid search, plus all the different forms and places that searches can originate (i.e., social media, search engines, ads, bookmarks). A direct search is when someone types your URL into a search engine specifically to go to your website. If someone knows what type of content or website she wants to land on, but doesn’t know the destination ahead of time, she’ll type keywords into a browser – like “coworking offices near me” – and then get a list of search results, which will include ads and sponsored content (at the top of the page and margins), followed by a list of text links. These text links are organic search results. For the most part, organic search results are driven by search engine optimization, or SEO. The number-one position on a SERP is the most coveted. A position in one of the top three search results is the next best thing. Landing on the first page of search results is the very least you can hope for, in terms of search results positioning. Just to explain really quick why it’s so important to focus on your organic search results, consider these stats by Moz, a marketing analytics platform, “On average, 71.33 percent of searches result in a page one organic click. Right now, you might be thinking, “Can I just pay for my website to show up at the top of SERPs? ” Yes, yes you can! And for authority backlinks to happen fast, it’ll cost you. Paid search is when you use a platform like Google Adwords to bid in an auction on specific keywords. When you hit on the right combination of keyword/bid, you could conceivably see your URL or display ad at the top of SERPs in no time at all. Just FYI, though, it’s not that difficult to find or identify the right mix of keywords. In fact, the paid-search or social media platform you use to create your campaign can help you in that area. Or if you have SEO skills or an SEO specialist on your team, even better because keywords play an important role in all types of search results. Organic and paid search do have some things in common. For both, you still need to get a search engine – like Google – to associate your website with certain keywords. But that’s just a fraction of how SEO-driven organic search results works. Your content and social media strategies are also very important. All search engines produce results based on a complicated and not-entirely-transparent algorithm. Though there is a sort of rulebook that search engine marketing professional are pretty good at learning and keeping up with. The good news is that you don’t have to know the algorithm to get your website to rank highly in organic searches. But unlike paid searches, it does take more time for a website to crawl its way up those coveted search engine results pages and even further up the top 10 spots. And if you’re wondering if it costs more to get your website to become a number-one organic search spot earner, well, there’s no simple yes or no answer. On the one hand, it doesn’t cost anything in that you don’t have to bid on keywords and clicks – as in, pay-per click, or PPC. On the other hand, if you’re paying someone to do your SEO, then yes, you’re paying someone a salary so your company can compete in the organic-search arena and get the results you want.