In order to define the organic growth strategy you need to understand what the goal is, how you will measure success. Your brief can be to:
- - Increase relevant organic traffic (no client ever asked 🗣️)
- - Increase relevant organic traffic for some specific categories (e.g. vacuum cleaners visibility for a home appliances brand, personal loans for a bank brand)
- - Increase relevant organic traffic for a specific customer decision journey stage (e.g. relevant disease awareness for OTCs, purchase specific flight routes for OTAs)
- - Increase SEO ROI (queries with good conversion rates for ecommerce)
With the goal in mind you can start to define the plan for organic growth. If you think about how to influence organic growth, here is a simple way to use the data:
- - Number of search queries - any website with a minimum organic search maturity has thousands of queries, most websites we work with have 20-40 thousands of queries at a monthly level, only a few work with more than 100k queries monthly.
- - Search volumes - each query has a search volume. If you sum the search volumes of your monthly search query you'll have a potential of visibility.
- - Impressions - each search that implies someone saw a link to your site on Google. If you are not on the first page, the number of impressions are very low. Moving queries from position 70 to 20 will give you no direct satisfaction in terms of visibility, it is a trap. If you need to prove results try choosing stakes with faster returns like moving from 16 to 6. This will return visibility and CTR.
- - Average position - a relative ranking of the position of your link on Google, where 1 is the topmost position, 2 is the next position, and so on.
- - Clicks - how often someone clicked a link from Google to your site.
Let's take the first brief example, the one no client ever asked, just to explain the general mechanism. Then, we'll look into the specifics of each brief scenario, cases we have repeatedly. Our client wants relevant traffic. The easiest way to increase the traffic is to influence the number of clicks, that means that you want a higher CTR (the calculation of clicks ÷ impressions).
You can influence the CTR by influencing the position of your queries. The higher the position, the higher the CTR. The question is how to choose the best queries to invest your effort in. Considering that it is easier to increase position for queries that are already in a good ranking position, you can choose queries from segments like position 6-10, 3-6 or 1.5-3. In ClimbinSearch you simply look at the underlying data of the segment of your choice. You will definitely get good ideas of optimization plans if you sort the queries in your chosen segment by impressions. The best ideas we get is when we sort by SEA indicators like paid search cost, paid search conversions, or by revenue. If it's in SEA and it's important, then it's a query worth investing in SEO also, right?
In the second example, the brief was to increase relevant organic traffic for some specific categories (e.g. vacuum cleaners visibility for a home appliances brand, personal loans for a bank brand).
The only difference in this case from the case above is that you need a prerequisite called categorization. If you need to optimize for specific categories, you want all your search universe (the tens of thousands of queries) segmented by categories. In ClimbinSearch we have a default categorization, but usually we opt in for rule based categorization or AI training categorization that goes hand in hand with the annual media investments. This is the way a brand has the most valuable information in the dashboards.
If categorization is in place, you simply apply the same approach as above, but with the data filtered with the categories in scope. Nice and easy🤩
In the third example, we need to increase relevant organic traffic for a specific customer decision journey stage (e.g. raise awareness about particular diseases and their curement if treated in early stages)
This is also a case where you can apply the same approach as above, but with the prerequisite called CDJ (customer decision journey).
If you need to optimize for a specific funnel stage, you want all your search universe(the tens of thousands of queries) segmented by the step in the customer decision journey. This way, you simply apply the filter of awareness, consideration or purchase and replicate the generic approach explained in the first example.
ClimbinSearch doesn't automatically categorize queries by user journey, it is a step you can add in the business insights enrichment phase. Most times we use rules to categorize queries in CDJ steps.
The fourth example, to increase relevant organic traffic for a specific customer decision journey stage and a specific category (e.g. relevant disease awareness for OTCs, purchase specific flight routes for OTAs)
This one simply combines the second and the third example. You need to make sure you're happy with the categorization and the CDJ mapping and you can simply filter all the data in order to get information about your scope of work for the SEO growth
The fifth example of SEO brief is to
increase SEO ROI (queries with good conversion rates for ecommerce). For this one we created a specific dashboard in ClimbinSearch called SEO ROI approach. It looks at all the queries that have transactions and revenue attached, it compares results with paid, it assumes that for the same query in paid or organic you'll get the same conversion rate and many more that deserve a dedicated article.
Until we create the article, if you're interested in this SEO ROI approach, you can
contact us for a discussion or a demo.If your goal is to bring relevant traffic, the easiest way is to look at rankings and their CTR and try to select for SEO optimization the queries that can be quick wins. This website has more than 20k organic queries monthly.
The math on this is quite simple. You see ~2x more clicks on avg pos 1-1.5 than avg pos 1.5-3. And you see ~2x clicks on avg pos 1.5-3 than avg pos 3-6. This is an example, but most websites have similar CTR gaps between these segments. Moving avg position may be good, but actually it makes no difference in clicks, conversions, revenue if you move from 76 to 24 even if it's a significant increase in your SERP position.
The best way to implement Organic Search Growth Strategy is to create iterations. To Build, Measure and Learn as an always on process, an infinite loop. You want to build tests, measure results and learn from the insights. SEO testing is a process where you experiment to learn what works best and apply at scale the plans with the best results in terms of time, effort and KPIs.
A hypothesis has to be very specific. For example I have the hypothesis that if I publish 5 off page articles in these 5 publications the ranking for the main keywords in the category will improve and the website will get 30% more visits on this particular category. The example is simplistic, you can have a complex plan that implies more actions. The point is to have plans simple enough to be implemented in one month or one quarter so that you can measure and learn from your tests. You will also have the opportunity to enjoy the good results more often.
Measure - as your plan is approved you need to make sure that you know how to measure exactly the impact of your plan being implemented. You can have a specific dashboard in ClimbinSearch that measures the impact. Some of our clients look at rankings per a selection of specific queries, others at landing pages and their visibility and the semantic associated, others at the whole category. It depends on what you want to accomplish. It is fun to see how your test evolves compared to your hypothesis.
It doesn't matter if your test is a success or not as long as you learn from it and know what to do next. As long as you make incremental steps you make sure your changes do not have a tremendous impact, but rather small positive changes that have a great impact over time.
