Traffic is essential if you want to grow your brand online. But generating traffic that converts is the biggest challenge that marketers and businesses face. And when it comes to quality traffic, nothing works better than organic traffic.
Paid traffic is instantaneous and it converts well. But it comes at a steep cost: the moment you stop paying for ads, the flow of traffic dries up. It isn’t a sustainable traffic generation source. On the other hand, investment in organic channels takes longer to show results, but it pays off big time. It is a consistent, sustainable, and evergreen traffic source.
First, let's start with identifying organic channels. An organic channel is a marketing channel that’s responsible for generating organic traffic. Organic, in this case, means natural — just as with all inbound marketing, the user comes to you. And natural traffic is generated via search engines. So, search engines are the primary organic channels that send natural traffic to your website.
When a user enters a search query in a search engine to solve their problem, that's the natural way to find brands and products you are looking for. Your ideal customers find you via a search engine without any marketing intervention from your brand.
This is the opposite of paid traffic, where you run ads to connect with your target audience.
Every brand, at some point in time, faces this dilemma to pick and focus on a marketing channel for traffic and leads. Organic vs. paid channels is the first choice you must make.
Investing in the right marketing channel at the right time — and making this decision at the right time — is crucial for your brand. Organic channel marketing is the best way to achieve long-term, sustainable growth. It is the natural way to generate traffic, leads, and sales for an extended period of time.
Here are the top reasons why you need to invest in organic channel marketing:
Organic channel marketing (also known as inbound marketing) costs 61 percent less than traditional marketing channels:
That's pretty great, but even better, it generates 54 percent more leads than other marketing channels. And you don’t have to regularly spend money to generate traffic (as you’d do with PPC). It grows over time.
Think of blogging.
A blog post you publish might not cost you more than $500 today, but it will stay on your blog for unlimited time. It will continue to bring traffic from search engines, potentially for years to come (with some refreshing). It is a low-cost investment and it continues to keep sending traffic your way.
In fact, older content is known to rank better than new content in SERPs. This means as your articles age, they drive more traffic to your website.
Here is a snapshot of how evergreen organic channel content performs: It takes an average of 1-3 years for a web page to rank in Google top 10 results:
This clearly shows the older your content gets, the better it ranks.
But it doesn’t just end here…
If you publish content on evergreen topics (that should cover a high percentage of content you produce), you'll not only rank for these keywords but will acquire natural backlinks over time.
You own your blog, all the content, and it won’t go anywhere.
Search engines are here to stay and so is your content. While some nuances like voice search, local search, and search intent will evolve, people will continue to need information. And they'll use search to get it.
Perhaps the best thing about organic channel marketing is that it gives your brand a competitive advantage. Nobody can replicate or copy it irrespective of what they do.
Why?
Because the age of the page/content plays a significant role in how search engines (especially Google) treat them. New pages need time to rank in SERPs. No matter how awesome a piece of content is and no matter where it is published, it won’t rank immediately.
So, if you are the first one to publish a piece of content on a specific topic, you'll have an edge over everyone else who publishes a similar piece of content later.
Besides, the rankings you acquire, the credibility your brand receives, and the backlinks you acquire naturally have no match. Even if your competitors can create similar or better content, they might not receive a similar response.
This is a reason why most new brands use Google search ads to outrank organic results because they can’t beat them organically. It takes a lot of time to outrank an established and high-authority website.
Be the first mover in your niche.
Organic channels are non-intrusive. And this is one of the best things about them.
When a potential buyer runs a search query in Google, they are trying to find a solution to a problem at will. Nobody is pushing the user to click a link. They have the liberty to scroll hundreds of search results and click any result they think is suitable.
There is no pushing. No begging. No obstruction. No intrusion.
Consumers don’t like intrusive marketing channels such as ads that keep popping up here and there when they're browsing online. As much as 64 percent of people use ad blockers because they think they're annoying and intrusive:
Investment in organic channel marketing puts you a step ahead. It won’t annoy your target audience.
Organic channel marketing costs less, has high ROI, high CTR, and high conversion rates.
In fact, more than 53 percent of marketers say that inbound (organic channel) marketing gives them higher ROI than outbound (paid) marketing:
This is because organic channel marketing is sustainable. It keeps growing with time. As we mentioned, a single evergreen article can generate traffic for several years as opposed to a paid ad that runs for a short time.
The average CTR of the first organic search result in Google is 31.73 percent and it decreases as you go down the SERPs:
A high CTR means a high conversion rate. But organic channels have a higher conversion rate because your ideal customers are finding you and reaching you.
A person who is running a search query is often actively looking for a solution or a product. They are in the buying mode. This isn't the case with a person who sees your ad while reading a news story on their favorite news site.
There are few marketing channels that offer you long-term, sustainable, and evergreen results. And the organic channel is one among them. It has no match. Every single penny you invest in organic channel marketing pays off — sooner or later.
If it isn’t working today, it can work tomorrow. But you might need some help to get there. Our inbound marketing experts are ready to help you see the power of organic channel marketing in your own brand.