You have a lot of options to drive traffic to your site. There’s social media, text ads, display ads, and sponsored content.
They can all make a difference in your business, but which one is the best way to get qualified leads? Take a look at natural search. It’s a way to leverage search engines to drive traffic to your website.
Are you ready to learn more about natural search? Find out what it is and why it provides a better return on investment compared to other forms of marketing.
What is Natural Search?
There are a lot of terms thrown around regarding search results. There’s organic search, search optimization, natural search, and paid search.
Natural search isn’t brought up that much, so you may not be familiar with that term. Natural search is getting your site’s pages to the top of search results without paid ads or otherwise sponsored content.
It is used interchangeably with organic search. That’s fine because they mean the exact thing. There’s no difference between them.
Why Natural Search Beats Other Marketing Methods
What is it about natural search? When you compare it to everything else, it comes out the clear winner. Check out these reasons why natural search stands alone as a must-have marketing tool in your arsenal.
1. Leads on Demand
Do you feel like you either have to slog through creating social media posts every day or dump a ton of money to get website traffic? You have to hope and pray that what you’re doing works, otherwise you’re wasting time and money.
When it’s done right, natural search can generate leads on demand. Being at the top of some searches can lead to a lot of traffic. People are also searching while you’re sleeping.
While they’re searching, they see your site and inquire about your products or services. This can happen at any time.
2. Your Website is Better
Natural search depends on a good website. Not just good, but one that is technically sound and is designed in a simple way.
To get to the top of search results, you have to give your visitors a great customer experience. Which means you probably have to clean yours up.
Site speed, security, and useful content are all things that search engines look for when determining search results. You also want to make sure that you have positive reviews in organic search results.
3. Beat the Competition
Natural search is kind of like natural selection. Only the strong survive. The truth is, there are absolutes in search results. Those at the top get most clicks – about a third of them.
Those underneath share the other 66% of clicks. Those on the other page? Good luck. Most people don’t even go there.
What that means for you is that there are definite winners and definite losers. If you’re on top getting all of the calls, your competitors aren’t.
4. You’re Not at the Mercy of One Company
This one might make you think twice because Google owns so much search engine market share. You might think that one algorithm change on Google might throw your entire SEO efforts out the window.
That may be a possibility, but it’s not as bad as depending on other social media efforts.
Here’s the big difference between an algorithm change on Google or on another social media channel. If you only depended on one social media channel for traffic, you could see a major dip that you can’t recover from.
When Google makes an algorithm change, it’s only to provide relevant content to searchers. That only forces you to focus on the basics. Have a good foundation, and always provide great content and user experience.
5. Long Term Results
When you invest in PPC ads, you have to continuously spend money in order to get results. That’s not a bad way to do things, but you may want to invest those funds elsewhere.
Search engines are about long term results. You’ll get better results over time as your site builds momentum. You’ll continue to see results, even if you take a short break.
6. Close Referrals
Do you get a lot of referral business? You could be missing out on a lot of referrals because people can’t find your business in search results.
Usually, someone asks for a referral or recommendation online. They’ll ask in a forum or a group. People will throw out names and the person now has homework to do. They’re going to research the companies
They’re likely to do an organic search to see what others are saying about your company. They’ll also look at your website to see if your business is legitimate or not.
If your business isn’t found in natural searches, you are losing business.
7. Works with Every Type of Marketing
The reason why natural search is so good for your business is that it works great with every other form of marketing. You know that it works with referral marketing.
Promotional marketing, networking, and other forms of offline marketing benefit from natural search, too. Your promotional items or billboard ads likely have your website on them. Similar to referrals, people will look you up online, too.
When you’re higher up in search results, you’ll have the credibility to get the click or the call.
Natural Search Rises to the Top of Marketing
There are too many advantages of natural search to count. They drive higher-quality traffic to your business that’s ready to convert into a customer.
Even for people who aren’t ready to buy now, you can earn their trust by seeing your site listed in multiple search results. With that trust, your visitors are more likely to become customers.
Do you want more great search tips? Check out the search tools on this site and see how you can begin to improve natural search results.