It’s not unusual for SEO experts to be thrown into a position without having received much formal training in conventional marketing philosophy.
But it’s more important than ever to comprehend and use time-tested marketing ideas into your SEO approach as the organic landscape gets more complicated and fragmented.
Search Engine Optimization > Organic Optimization
You can no longer increase your organic exposure to potential clients solely by relying on search engines.
Users today find information on the internet from many different sources.
We are currently navigating a landscape where organic real estate in search results is decreasing and search engines are only one component of an immensely complex customer journey due to the introduction of AI-driven search and expanding sponsored search placements.
Platforms like TikTok (used as a search engine by 40%+ of Generation Z users), Pinterest, and Reddit all offer chances for extra organic reach outside of Google search, thus your strategy needs to change from search engine optimization to multi-platform organic optimization.
You can no longer increase your organic exposure to potential clients solely by relying on search engines.
Users today find information on the internet from many different sources.
We are currently navigating a landscape where organic real estate in search results is decreasing and search engines are only one component of an immensely complex customer journey due to the introduction of AI-driven search and expanding sponsored search placements.
I’ll go into more detail about each concept in the parts that follow, highlighting how it may be used and the real advantages it provides, all of which are based on tested marketing science.
1. 3Cs Research
A fundamental component of marketing, 3Cs research can be used to strengthen your organic strategy.
It entails developing a deeper understanding of your business, your clients, and the sector or industry as a whole.
Let’s examine each of these categories in more detail and see how it relates to SEO.
Company Research
What It Is
Company research is about understanding your business (or your clients’ business) inside out. It should dig deeper into your internal understanding of:
- Objectives – What you’re trying to achieve as a business, and how marketing can support.
- Audience – Who you’re targeting and why.
- Positioning – What makes your business stand out in the eyes of potential customers?
- The market – What are the major challenges faced, and what opportunities do you see in the future?
Why It Matters To SEO Practitioners
You will be able to concentrate your efforts on creating material that will more effectively resonant with prospective customers if you have a deeper understanding of the market and the trends influencing its future.
Understanding the company’s positioning and main goals will also make it easier for you to link your performance to higher-level objectives and more effectively demonstrate value to senior stakeholders.
Examples And Benefits
By setting high-level business goals, you can ladder up your organic reporting and demonstrate the C-suite your results.
The value of organic to any business will be further demonstrated by demonstrating how your organic KPIs may help fulfill broader marketing and business objectives.
Customer Research
What It Is
This involves identifying your target audience’s characteristics, needs, and behaviors through both qualitative (e.g., depth interviews) and quantitative (e.g., surveys) research.
Why SEO Professionals Should Care
Understanding your audience better enables you to produce content that appeals to them, increasing overall organic reach for pertinent topics and enhancing engagement and conversion rates.
Examples And Benefits
By understanding your audience’s needs and pain points, you can craft more relevant content, drive more clicks to your website, and build your brand presence alongside the most timely themes.
Category Research
What It Is
Category research is understanding the broader market, competitors, trends, and potential opportunities or threats within the industry.
Why SEO Professionals Should Care
You can spot chances and gaps that rivals might have missed by having an understanding of the competitive landscape in your sector.
Benefits And Examples
At the most fundamental level, reviewing the backlink profiles of competitors might provide opportunities for additional backlinks, boosting the authority of your site.
Additionally, you may evaluate the networks and channels that your rivals are funding and that are producing the greatest organic results by using tools like SimilarWeb:
By delving deeper into 3Cs research, you’ll gain deeper insights that aligns SEO with the broader business strategy, delivering more value to the brands you work with.
2. Segmentation And Targeting
Segmentation entails dividing a larger, more complex market (such as all golfers worldwide) into smaller, more manageable segments (such as golfers over the age of 50).
Based on market fit, size, and growth potential, targeting aims to identify the most profitable segments to pursue.
You may develop incredibly tailored organic campaigns and concentrate your efforts on the appropriate audiences by knowing which consumer segments are the most significant to your company.
What Segmentation Is
Segmentation entails breaking the large market down into more manageable, distinct segments based on traits like geography, behavior, or demography.
Targeting is determining which market groups to target based on their prospective worth and fit with your company.
Why It Matters To SEO Practitioners
Dividing your audience into segments allows you to tailor your SEO strategies to meet each group’s specific needs and preferences.
As a result, your material is more pertinent and receives better engagement.
You may ensure that your SEO efforts are focused where they will have the biggest impact by concentrating on the most lucrative or pertinent sectors.
Examples And Benefits
- Demographic segmentation: If you’re targeting a certain demographic, such as smaller fleets (using the haulage example above), you’ll be able to create content based on the needs of these audiences, which will be vastly different from larger haulers.
- Geographic segmentation: If your business serves multiple locations, creating location-specific landing pages for key regions can improve local search rankings and drive more targeted traffic.
This idea will enable you to move away from a generic strategy and toward a more nuanced, tailored one that suits the particular requirements and preferences of various consumer segments.
3. Positioning
The goal of brand positioning is to give customers a memorable, favorable perception of your company.
It is the theme that ought to run through all marketing endeavors like a thread of gold.
What It Is Positioning is the opinion about your goods or services that you want your clients to have.
A sharper message that appears in campaigns and creative assets is the product of effective positioning, which requires establishing what makes your brand stand out from the competition and why consumers should choose it over the competition.
Why SEO Professionals Should Care
Effective positioning increases brand recognition, credibility, and trust.
Your brand’s positioning can have a significant impact on your organic performance, increase branded visitors from search, and increase conversion rates for current website traffic.
Benefits And Examples
Understanding the differentiators and themes that make your brand stand out from the competition will help you concentrate on producing more content that adheres to these themes in order to maximize organic visibility and support your company’s distinct positioning.
Red Bull, for instance, bases its marketing strategy on “giving you wings.”
This transcends every marketing activity it invests in as a brand.
It wants to be synonymous with excitement and risk-taking, and it has succeeded at this attempt through various campaigns.
Understanding this positioning from an organic perspective will help you take advantage of content, PR, and co-branding opportunities and make sure that any content recommendations you provide are consistent with your company’s brand strategy.
4. Media Planning
The intricacy of the contemporary organic landscape is highlighted by developments like Google’s Search Generative Experience, the emergence of social networks as search engines, and the expanding impact of producers on organic performance.
The correct channels must be chosen, but effective media planning also involves knowing when and how to use each channel.
Gaining maximum brand visibility everywhere your clients are online—whether through social media, paid search, or organic search—is essential for success in such a complicated ecosystem.
Media strategy is typically connected to advertising. However, it’s equally crucial in the context of SEO and organic search.
What It Is To distribute and market content to potential customers wherever they are online, media strategy for organic search involves identifying and utilizing a variety of online channels, including search engines, social media, review platforms, third-party sites, and more.
Why SEO Professionals Should Care
The correct audience will see your material at the right moment thanks to effective media strategy. It is more important to make sure that information is seen and read than it is to produce high-quality content.
Examples And Benefits
- Channel selection: Identifying where your target audience spends time online helps in selecting the right channels. If your target audience is professionals, platforms like LinkedIn might be a more effective use of your time than others.
- Content format planning: Different platforms may require different content formats. A well-planned media strategy could include creating short video snippets for Instagram, long-form articles for your blog, and engaging videos for YouTube, all from one core content piece.
- Cross-channel integration: A cohesive media plan ensures that your messages are consistent across channels. Using consistent language and visuals enhances brand recognition and drives better results.
- Monitoring and optimization: Good media planning also includes tracking the performance of various channels and being ready to adjust your strategy.
Approach organic with a media planning mindset, and you’ll expand your view beyond traditional search engine optimization, generating much greater organic reach.
5. Full-funnel Measurement
Traditional SEO metrics like rankings and traffic are not included in full-funnel analysis.
To comprehend how consumers are interacting with your content and how it generates revenue, it examines the full customer journey from awareness to conversion.
Why SEO Professionals Should Care
While traditional SEO frequently focuses on increasing rankings and boosting traffic, you must make sure that these efforts support your company’s overarching objectives.
Examples And Benefits
- Awareness: Monitoring how many new visitors are attracted through specific keywords or content helps you understand what’s generating initial interest.
- Consideration: Analyzing on-site behavior, such as click-through rates on product pages, content downloads, and number of pages viewed on average, will identify where improvements can be made to the user journey.
- Conversion: Identifying which channels and pages lead to actual sales or sign-ups.
Successful organic optimization requires a holistic approach that transcends the full buyer journey.
You can see how your efforts contribute to every stage of the customer journey by selecting the appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) and measuring performance, allowing for more targeted, responsive, and effective tactics.
Conclusion
The five aforementioned guiding principles are crucial cornerstones for your SEO organic strategy’s long-term viability.
They provide a framework to assist you make sure your brand is prepared for success regardless of the most recent technical advancements that have an impact on search, serving as a crucial link between the timeless principles of traditional marketing and the dynamic world of digital marketing.
