SEO vs. Organic Search Marketing

In any discussion of Organic Search Marketing techniques, there is a critical distinction to be made between Organic Search Marketing and its cousin, Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is the practice of maximizing a search engine’s ranking of a web page for a given set of search terms based on some knowledge of the search engine’s internal workings. Useful SEO techniques include the following:

• Altering page layout to make content more accessible to search engine spiders.
• Seeding page content with prominent keywords from the desired set.
• Establishing links to and from other, highly ranked web pages.
• Metatagging page titles, headers, images, to increase saerch engine visibilty.

SEO operators also engage in other, far less legitimate practices, such as:

• Artificially inflating page keyword incidence by hiding lists of keywords in the background.
• Establishing link farms of automatically generated, heavily cross-linked pages to inflate the search engine’s perception of site popularity.
• Spamming blogs, message boards, and other public forums with bogus comments containing the target page’s URL.

Search engine operators are fully aware of such practices, and sites that engage in them are frequently identified as spam and removed from search indexes entirely. Meanwhile, though, they clog the marketplace and drive up costs for legitimate businesses.

Finally, some operators charge huge fees for services based on claims made under the SEO umbrella that are actually fraudulent. These services include:

• Guaranteed placement, an impossibility since search engine rankings are automated and the processes that govern them are completely outside any SEO practitioner’s control.
• Link exchange, a pointless quid-pro-quo linking scheme that attempts to establish durable link farms using non-automated websites.

Note that, whether legitimate or not, SEO techniques focus on the optimal arrangement of existing content (if any real content exists to be arranged). Organic Search Marketing, by contrast, addresses a deeper question:

What content should a site present to begin with?

The mission of Organic Search Marketing is to generate and present relevant, useful content that meets the unique needs of a client’s actual, real-life customers, in order to attract more customers just like them!

A key differentiator between the two approaches lies in the selection of target keywords. SEO techniques require the explicit selection of keywords, typically based on an analysis of which search keywords have drawn the most traffic in the recent past in a given industry.  Consequently, by the time a keyword’s popularity has risen enough for an SEO practitioner to detect, its value as a target has already peaked and the marketplace has moved on.

In short, SEO follows the market.

By contrast, target keywords in an Organic Search Marketing campaign are implicit to the content generated. Customer interactions determine the nature of the content, and their most common concerns appear frequently enough for related phrases to acquire keyword status. Since the customers are the market, an aggressive Organic Search Marketing campaign opens a window into shifts in market dynamics as they occur, long before SEO operators ever detect them.

In other words, Profit Rank’s Organic Search Marketing techniques will enable your firm to lead the market and capitalize on traffic volume that also converts well.