Do you think it’s possible for a brand to be set up purely on an organic basis? That is with SEO. And do pretty well in the market in terms of getting leads for major projects including web and app development and game development projects. And this niche is just an example.
There are many other companies, small businesses, medium and even large businesses that are surviving just on organic marketing. Few of them do put in some PPC, paid ad efforts. But the majority of their work is purely organic.
Human-Written Content As Opposed To. AI-Generated Content
Now these are companies that have mostly been around for many years. But there are also newer companies that are doing just the same thing. There might be a bit of a difference in the way that they leverage content for their websites in terms of using organic human written content compared to any other type of content.
Basically AI content has been the rage in recent times. But there’s a trade-off. Technical people in SEO and organic marketing know about this trade-off.
SEO Serves as Your Brand’s Foundation for Long-Term Growth
There’s also a couple of things to consider. Like if your site is new, it definitely needs input that’s human written. The bulk of your content at least that goes on your website, your blogs and everything else should be human written.
But if your site is a mature website and it’s been around for a while with organic and human written content, then you can easily go with the bulk of AI content that can drive your marketing. Within this there’s still a debate. There are a lot of people who still argue about using AI content from the word go.
Here’s Why New Websites Need Humanized Content
Set up a website and they start marketing it with the AI content. That doesn’t mean that they’re not going to get anywhere. They will.But experience teaches us that using human written content will drive traffic way faster to your website and get you rankings that you wouldn’t nearly get with AI written content. Alongside this there’s also other considerations to make in terms of the keywords that you use. There are various kinds of keywords and it also depends on how well you’ve done your keyword research.
Keyword Research is the Backbone of Organic Growth
If you’ve chosen the right keywords with the right competency, the right search volume, it’s definitely going to help drive organic traffic to your website. That along with a preference for human written content will take your website places fairly quickly compared to a website that you put out there and just flush with AI written content. Besides the content that’s used and my brief mention of keywords for marketing your website the organic way, there’s a lot more that goes into it.
It’s a paid effort because you will be hiring people to write for you and do your technical SEO and your on-page and your off-page tactics. This requires time, it requires money. The difference between going this way and marketing your website with paid ads, there’s a judgment call to make as to how you want to divide your efforts.
SEO Requires More Than Just Good Content
There are big believers in organic marketing and they put all their funds, even if they have a hefty investment, they put it into their organic efforts because they know what their search engine algorithm wants. If they understand SEO well enough and the way search engines work, they prefer to put their money that way. That is, hire people to do the work with the right strategy.
This brings long-term results, which is what you want. When you’re not doing any marketing, your employees are not engaged in working on your website, your website is just out there doing the work for you. That’s the kind of independence and autonomy you need.
Organic Marketing vs. Paid Advertising
But to say that you do not need paid ads or you do not want to go the route of paid ads, you may be missing out on a lot of things. For example, immediate results. There will always be quite a few customers out there looking for the top-ranking websites when they run a search on any search engine.
If you’ve put out paid ads there, it’s likely that your site is going to show up in the first half of the search results.
The Long-Term Value of SEO and the Unpredictability of Search Engine Algorithm Updates
When you are asked how long does SEO take to work for you, you need to realize that a lot of the time there are aspects of SEO that we don’t understand. One of the major things that SEO operatives complain about is the fact that algorithms get updates from time to time. And after the SEO operatives have already spent weeks and even months working on the organic marketing for their brands, they suddenly receive an update and they discover that all their work has been undone in a lot of ways.
While they may have made progress in bringing a brand up to the first or second page results based on certain keywords, they then discover that their brands are not showing up even on the third and fourth search engine results pages.
SEO Still Delivers a Beneficial Return on Investment
How long does SEO take to show results? That sort of situation is quite heartbreaking for them. And oftentimes it takes them weeks to find out exactly what the algorithm update was about.
Other times it’s also that the algorithm update has nothing to do with the particular efforts that SEO operatives have been making. But in one way or another, the brand suffers a setback. This is not an everyday instance, but it’s something that does happen from time to time.
And it’s part of the challenges that you face while working on SEO. Overall if you were to compare the SEO efforts with the progress you make, the leads you eventually land and the conversions on top of that, any SEO operative will tell you that it’s well worth the effort, it’s more efficient in terms of the amount you spend on taking your brand to the first page of search engine results versus the cost you pay by hiring even a team to get those results. Now it so happens that there are multiple pages, products, or services that you may be working on as an SEO operative.
Competitive Keywords Are Worth the Investment
Let’s take a case in point for a digital brand that sells web development services, designing, app development, and game development. Now all these different aspects will have separate pages to target their customers; they will have specific keywords that target those customers. And that’s an incredible amount of effort for any team to take on.
But there are several companies that invest hefty amounts in marketing each of those pages because they do know that even one conversion over a few weeks will cover the cost of all that they are spending on their organic marketing efforts. Now to circle back to the point that we were making earlier regarding SEO research.
So before you do your marketing in terms of using your keywords to rank each page, you do have to know which keywords are the most lucrative, which are the most efficient, which is the easiest to rank, the ones which are most competitive and the ones which are not that competitive.
How long does SEO take: Understanding Search Intent
Now, oftentimes there are even some keywords that you’d want to target and use even though they may be difficult to work on in terms of ranking your page on that keyword. But the big brands, this is what they do. The competitive brands, they are willing to put in those efforts; they are willing to invest that amount in terms of money and time to become competitive on a certain keyword.
It may be painstaking, it may exhaust a lot of finances but at the end of the day when they do achieve that competency, they are in the bigger game with other brands. So that’s one aspect that you as an SEO operative may consider. Other than that, most brands choose to go the way of using what’s easiest, what’s lucrative in the long run and they leverage things like what they call search intent.
And quite literally they are able to harness the thought process of potential customers by manipulating the keywords that could be used by those customers. And alongside that, given the fact that keywords can be broken, keywords do not necessarily have to be a fixed set of characters in a string and that can bring them the results they need. The algorithms are now much smarter than they were 20 years ago and so that’s to the SEO operative’s benefit and any brand’s benefit that they can compete on keywords that may be slight variations of the existing ones that are highly competitive.
Now another aspect to consider besides just the keywords, it’s also the story you tell. Algorithms are now smart enough to pick up on the story that you write or the story that you tell in terms of audio and video. They all tie into the SEO strategy that you formulate.