Benefits & Risks of
Organic Search Marketing

Organic Search Marketing offers your firm a number of unique benefits compared to other marketing techniques. They are:

• Responsiveness. Because published content directly reflects the underlying concerns of your clients, changes in the marketplace will produce corresponding shifts in the nature of traffic driven to the website, whether or not marketplace changes are detected by your firm's management!
• Fraud immunity. Unlike Sponsored Search campaigns, Organic Search Marketing efforts cannot be undermined by click fraud.
• Opt-out immunity. Unlike e-mail campaigns, search engine users cannot deliberately refrain from receiving your message when it is delivered as a search result.
• Cumulative effect. Each additional piece of content posted contributes to your firm's footprint in search engine indices.
• Persistent effect. Unlike Sponsored Search, e-mail, and other formats, content continues to deliver its message via search long after implementation.
• Cross-channel impact. Content developed as part of an Organic Search Marketing campaign can be leveraged across many channels, including e-mail, print, and other media. Keywords can be extracted from new content to power maximal margins in Sponsored Search campaigns.
• The “Long Tail” effect. Internet keywords are distributed among websites according to a power-law distribution. The resulting long tail suggests that a website with sufficiently diverse content will be more reliably accessed via a large number of relatively obscure keywords than via a small number of relatively popular ones. Organic Search Marketing produces this diversity of content.

There are also a number of risks and limitations associated with Organic Search Marketing. They are:

• Low transparency. In the Search Marketing Cycle, transparency refers to the precision with which one can gather performance data at various stages of the cycle. Organic Search Marketing suffers from low transparency at the Impressions stage: it is impossible to count directly how often the target site is displayed in search results.
• Poor coupling. In the Search Marketing Cycle, coupling refers to the degree to which a change at one stage produces a predictable effect in the following stage. Organic Search Marketing suffers from poor coupling between the Marketing and Search stages: changes in site content produce effects on search results whose specific nature and timing are impossible to predict.
• High latency. In the Search Marketing Cycle, latency refers to the degree to which a change at one stage produces a delayed effect in the following stage. Organic Search Marketing suffers from high latency between the Marketing and Search stages: depending on their frequency and other factors, changes in site content may only produce effects on search results following a delay of days or weeks.
• Poor controllability. Ultimately, the goal of any marketing effort is to alter the behavior of some target metric—net revenue, for example—in a desirable manner. In the Search Marketing Cycle, controllability refers to the degree to which specific changes at the Marketing stage produce consistently predictable and desirable effects on this target metric. The transparency, coupling, and latency issues described above result in a dynamic that is controllable in qualitative terms, but which can be expected to produce the occasional surprising result.
• Potential for operational loss. One consequence of the poor controllability of Organic Search Marketing is that—unlike Sponsored Search—there is no effective way to eliminate the possibility of operational loss. This risk does carry a corresponding reward: successful Organic Search campaigns tend to operate at far higher profit margins than their Sponsored Search counterparts.
• No immunity from blacklisting. An Organic Search Marketing campaign pursued using some of the questionable techniques listed in Section 4.1 runs risks blacklisting: permanent removal from search engine indices.
• Low granularity. Unlike Sponsored Search, which can segment a market nearly without limit, Organic Search Marketing campaigns must focus on the broader product offering.
• Poor channel bias control. Organic Search Marketing campaigns can exert no direct control over who sees search engine results, potentially producing a poorly-qualified traffic stream. There are, however, plenty of opportunities to exert indirect control over channel bias by creating content that specifically addresses the needs of the desired demographic.
• Significant operational impact. A successful Organic Search Marketing campaign depends critically on the creation of useful, relevant content, and every hour your firm spends creating such content is an hour not spent acquiring and servicing customers. Competition from operational concerns is by far the most significant reason why many Organic Search Marketing efforts fail! Profit Rank mitigates this risk by assuming the lion’s share of this operational burden, leaving your staff free to engage in the all-important tasks that keep the cash register ringing.