Organic or paid?
That’s the question.
The difference between these two has sparked a serious debate that has been going on for almost a decade. On the one hand, blog owners want to generate genuine interest in their posts. But on the other hand, many of them also want to monetize their content, which can be done quicker by means of generating paid traffic.
So far, organic traffic dominates in this debate for one simple reason: it is a more sustainable approach.
Here’s the deal.
Investing in paid traffic is good for your blog if you want immediate attention of the public. You’ll get quick results, as your blog will be advertised across many authoritative platforms. For instance, if you invest in Google Ads, your blog will appear on Google or YouTube.
However, this fun party cannot go on for a long time. Once you stop investing in paid traffic, you’ll lose all momentum. You can benefit from paid traffic right away but the results are long-lasting.
If you’re a blog owner and you don’t sell anything, investing in paid traffic is not the strategy you’re looking for. Instead, you might be more interested in building up your reputation with delivering high-quality content, which is what organic traffic is focused on. And, it’s free!
Marketers from both B2B and B2C companies largely prefer investing in organic traffic. Here’s what the statistics tell us:
- 61% of marketers claim that growing their organic presence is their top priority for inbound marketing
- Last year, over 51% of consumed content was driven by organic search results
- Around 80% of users ignore paid search results, choosing organic results instead (one more point to support organic traffic)
Although organic traffic has a set of convincing benefits, there’s still one major drawback – time. You may invest a lot of your time in producing content that drives organic results, but a lot of time will pass before you start seeing any convincing results.
That is why you should incorporate the strategy that will focus on driving organic traffic early on, preferably on the stage of developing content before you actually launch your blog. This means that you’ll have to optimize your content to make it drive organic traffic.
Too overwhelming?
Let’s take it step-by-step.
Step #1 Leveraging SEO
In terms of driving organic traffic to a blog, the primary concern is helping your posts appear in Google search results. This means that before creating content, you’ll have to take a look at it from the reader’s perspective.
What exactly are they looking for when they come across your article?
What keywords do they type in, when they are looking for the topic related to your content?
Based on your answers, you’ll be able to come up with different keywords that will influence the search engine ranking.
Generally speaking, when users are looking for information online, they type in one of the four kinds of keywords:
1. Navigational keywords – when they are looking for a particular website. Thus, they often include a brand name and a topic connected to it. For instance, if you type in Ocean WP and organic traffic, you’ll get the results, related to the topic and the website:
2. Informational keywords – when certain information is searched for. They often include words ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘boost’, ‘increase’, etc. Let’s say, you’re looking for a solution to a certain problem, like how to reuse plastic bottles for home design:
3. Transactional keywords – when a user is ready to buy a certain product or receive a certain service. For instance, a person is looking for a newsletter to sign up for. The words they type in are transactional keywords that help Google find relevant websites:
4. Commercial keywords – when there’s clear purchase intent. They include words like ‘buy’, ‘purchase’, ‘price’ or ‘sale:
Although all these keywords work equally well for driving organic traffic to a blog article, not all of them can be applied to every blog post. This is what some marketers call targeted keyword strategy.
Here’s an example. International real estate company Flatfy went from a startup to a full-grown commercial success by investing in their blog. They created a strategy, according to which they had to stick to industry-specific informational, navigational and transactional keywords. It took them a year to build up organic traffic that brought them to the top of Google Search ranking:
Keyword optimization is a time-consuming process, and you’ll have to do it for every blog post. However, if you use WordPress, there’s a number of WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO that help you use keywords suitably in the content you’re writing. These plugins also optimize Meta title and Meta description for even better SEO results.
Step #2 Link-Building
When writing content for your blog, you’ll naturally reference other sources that you’ve used for your post. But what about links to your own content?
This strategy is called internal link building. According to NinjaOutreach, including internal links helps boost organic traffic by 40%. Here’s an example of how it looks like in an article:
When optimizing your blog’s SEO to drive organic traffic, this strategy can help you secure a position on the first page of search results. Here’s how else you can benefit from it:
- it boosts the number of visitors to your blog
- it shows your blog’s high activity
- it an effective way to convert occasional visitors into followers
There are a couple of things you should be aware of when working with internal links:
1. Including low-quality or irrelevant links. Google is all about value. No one exactly knows how they analyze inbound or outbound links, but if the link you include has nothing to do with the topic of your post, you’ll probably get pushed to the oblivion of the second page of search results.
2. Keeping links to pages that don’t work. As a blog owner, you’ll occasionally have to face some technical problems, and, as a result, some of your pages might not work. WordPress has plugins like Broken Link Checker that regularly updates you on the status of your internal as well as external links to keep your SEO results high.
Step #3 Try Guest Blogging
Sharing guest posts is considered to be one of the most effective strategies to drive organic traffic. You can either invite other bloggers to contribute to your website and share the link to their blog or do the same for them and include the link to your blog in your guest post.
Guest blogging is considered one of the most credible inbound strategies that drive tons of organic traffic. Neil Patel in his article about guest posts mentions that almost 63% of readers perceive blogs with multiple authors to be more trustworthy.
Guest blogging is how Buffer managed to increase their visibility from 2.5K to almost 8K in less than a year. Thus, doing guest posting both for your blog and for other resources is a great way to boost visibility and drive organic traffic.
Final Thoughts
Even though it takes some type to pay off, investing in organic traffic is brings more rewarding results that will last longer. Hopefully, this simple, basic guide will help you understand better, which steps to follow when creating a blog that generates permanent organic traffic.
