By Steve Burkhart
The Hoffman Agency, San Jose
As companies go shopping for better customer acquisition strategies for 2015, they should start by reviewing their organic search performance for blogs, newsletters, YouTube videos and websites.
Many companies invest heavily in paid SEO for their digital properties, but completely ignore the most powerful link to potential customers, the organic piece.
With the organic search playing field increasingly tilting toward high-quality content — defining “high quality” as useful, educational, insightful or amusing — PR sits in the perfect position to capitalize.
Many SEO consultancies have tried working on organic search to pick up incremental revenue. That’s because the Google search algorithm once favored the technical side over content, so they could help their clients get served up in organic search results when they didn’t necessarily have the best content or even relevant content.
The content piece is far and away the key driver for driving massive improvement in search results, but companies should also hire organic search experts or agencies who:
Know How to Develop a Keyword Taxonomy
This keyword research identifies search terms relevant to potential buyers’ online search process and prioritizes these keywords for SEO.
Understand the Core Tenets of Keyword Implementation
It’s important to integrate these keywords into organic search properties throughout the entire website, including webpage URLs, the actual webpage content, as well as the behind-the-scenes metadata tags (title tag, meta description tag, image ALT text, H level tags)
Create Credible Measurement/Analytics
How are your keywords performing? Do you show up on page 1 for search terms your potential customers are using? Quantifying the results helps you improve outcomes over time.
Getting started with organic search can seem overwhelming at first, but there are resources to help get you started. For example, The Beginners Guide to SEO by MOZ is a popular one-stop shop for those who have just started in this field, and it takes you through all the basic concepts as well as some advanced techniques down the road that you will need to know.
Second, get industry updates through media outlets/blogs. Just to name a couple — The MOZ blog and Search Engine Land’s SEO Channel. These SEO publications cover the latest organic search news as well as search engine updates. It’s extremely valuable to keep up with the organic search daily news, since this is a fast-growing field, and industry standard and search engine rules are constantly changing.
You can also learn more about how companies can capitalize on organic search by reading The Hoffman Agency’s SlideShare deck called “The Blurring Line Between Digital Marketing and PR.” It lays out the dot-connecting logic for emphasizing organic search and why PR should lead the charge.
