How To Get Your Money’s Worth From Natural Search

How To Get Your Money’s Worth From Natural Search

Every affiliate marketer’s advertising budget is limited. But we often feel pressured to spend as much as possible on PPC and other paid forms that push the cushion past the safety zone. The idea of just "sitting and waiting" for natural search results to send us traffic makes us feel helpless, at the mercy of the whims of Google and fickle searchers. Taking control, by getting the brand name out there, makes us feel we are "doing something" to generate traffic.

But that attitude rests on accepting a false alternative, and a view of organic search that isn’t exactly right. It is possible to take control of your "results destiny" and save a lot of money in the process. The secret consists of a combination of adjusting our attitudes and a series of practical steps to increase page rank without busting the bank.

Think about Behavior

Good marketers don’t concern themselves with just clicks. They think about behavior. You do have some influence over the behavior of searchers. When those searchers put in a keyword or two and scan the results, that’s evidence that they are actively looking for you. Over 90% will look for you on the first page or two before they give up and try again.

You can influence the odds of getting on that first page or two to a remarkable degree. And when you appear high in natural search results, you’re likely to stay there for long periods.

By contrast, PPC results will fluctuate much more, based on factors outside your control (such as your competitor’s budget).

So, how do you increase your odds to compensate for a small PPC budget? By substituting savvy for dollars. Cover all the basics and the bases.

Attitude Adjustment

First, consider some of the things that keep us from embracing natural search as a primary strategy.

Natural SEM seems unpredictable (and, to an extent, it is). Throw enough money at PPC and you’ll get on Google’s front page for your chosen keywords. Given the volume of traffic there, you’re bound to get clicks.

The drawbacks are many and well known.

It’s all too easy to slip off those paid results. Fail to get the clicks that Google or Yahoo think you should, and you’ll soon be replaced by someone they think is more relevant to the searcher. Their focus, understandably, is on presenting websites that are of greatest interest to their customers. They may or may not agree that your potential customers are the same searchers.

Compensating for that possibility can require you to throw a big chunk of your budget at the problem. A limited daily budget can make your listing invisible a big chunk of the time. If your monthly Yahoo PPC budget is chewed up in 10 days, you disappear for the remaining three weeks.

That reduces the odds of those searchers seeing you when they’re actively looking. If your competitor’s ad appears instead of yours, the sale is almost guaranteed not to go to you. At least with natural search, you’ve got a shot — often a good one.

There’s another aspect of the unpredictability of natural search that instills a fear of relying on it: the risk factor.

With PPC you know how much you’re going to spend, and if you spend enough, you can reasonably predict the outcome a month ahead of time. With a natural search strategy, you can find out how good your methods are only after some time has passed. That makes it more risky, and tolerating risk — here, in the form of the time delay between effort and reward — is emotionally difficult for most of us.

The third sticking point involves both a psychological aspect, and a practical one. To generate good results with a natural search strategy requires making changes to our websites — sometimes, a lot of them over time. It means experimenting.

Experiment entails risk, but we’ve adjusted to that. (Right?) Still, there is an emotional pull that makes us reluctant to modify or even abandon a website design that we personally find attractive or functional. But, remember, the customer is always right!

You can’t always be certain whether a particular design will bring traffic. But if week after week passes and you’re not getting inbound links, if you have visitors that come, stay a few seconds, then bail without buying, one part of the cause is likely your look and feel. They’re "voting with their feet," and the market is sending you signals that you need to change.

Practical Considerations

Change isn’t just emotionally hard, though. It requires real work — time-consuming work. Affiliate marketers always have more to do than time to do it. (What entrepreneur doesn’t?) Overhauling your site to increase rank and traffic may be far down on your list, unless you just happen to enjoy that sort of thing. Most marketers would rather be doing something other than tweaking HTML. But change it you must, if you want to change your income.

Do Market Research

First, find out what searchers are searching for in your category. That means, for example, that if you sell wedding flowers, be a searcher yourself and examine what comes up when you look. Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes is a tried-and-true method of giving them what they want.

Then, supplement your efforts with some good tools.

Use Keyword Research Tools

According to one recent survey, the top five keyword research tools are:

Keyword Discovery (18%)

http://www.keyworddiscovery.com

Wordtracker (18%)

http://www.wordtracker.com

WordZe (15%)

http://www.wordze.com

Google Keyword Tool (14%)

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

SEO Digger (12%)

http://seodigger.com

If you have a favorite, go for it. The important thing is to find out which keywords people (including you) actually use, then tailor your website content accordingly. No need to go black hat and engage in keyword stuffing. That strategy often backfires, anyway. But let the science of statistics lend you a hand where possible.

Natural search is a numbers game, and your aim is to up your odds. If you use keywords that people naturally use to search for what you sell, you increase the chances of your site ranking higher in the organic results.

Adjust Your Content

That method will send you back to working on your website again and again. But refining your site helps improve your rank. Remember, Google is looking first and foremost for relevance. They’re trying to deliver results to their customers that fit best what the searcher is seeking. Making "their" visitors and "your" visitors overlap as much as possible is the holy grail of natural search.

To implement that strategy will mean adjusting your copy to coincide more closely with those keywords. It’s true that Google does a lot of synonym matching internally. That’s how they bring up results containing "floral arrangements" when the  earcher entered "wedding flower designs." But the closer you get to what most searchers type, the better your odds of appearing high in the organic results.

That point is especially important if you publish articles or tutorials and other lengthy copy on your site. Giving your visitors meaty content brings in the eyeballs. It gives the spiders lots to chew on and helps make your pages sticky for humans. So, while it’s important to keep your articles sounding natural to a real reader, pay attention to the keywords and their placement.

Forcing keywords into the first sentence when the result sounds unnatural is overdoing it. But they should appear within the first 90 words or so, and again near the end. An additional mention in the middle is also a good idea. Here’s where using keyword synonyms can really help; they give you an opportunity to cover a wide range of search terms and still deliver natural-sounding content.

Network for Backlinks

Along with relevant keywords, the search engines look for the number of backlinks. Remember that they are trying to judge usefulness. One measure of that is popularity. They assume, rightly so, that if lots of people found your site worthwhile — as evidenced by the fact that they made the effort to link to you — others will, too. In short, they’re using those publishers as proxy votes and giving weight to their judgments. Studies show they are right to do so.

You can take advantage of that aspect of the search algorithms by getting links from high traffic sites to yours. Easier said than done? You bet. Publishers are busy, and they know that a link from their popular site is valuable. But giving them something they find worthwhile — products of interest to their visitors, useful content, sometimes just a polite request — can increase the number of "Yes" responses you get.

Just as with everything else about natural search (or paid search, for that matter), it’s a numbers game, as we said before. You won’t get every link you hope for. But the more the merrier, especially when those other sites have good traffic. Even when they don’t, you have two things going for you. First, every link helps a little. Second, they can grow. (Even IBM was small at one time.) As they do, you benefit along with them.

You can use tools like Backlink Checker (http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker) to find backlinks to a site.

If you want to trade your money for your time, you can buy (or sell) backlinks at a place like Backlinks.com  (http://www.backlinks.com). How worthwhile purchased links are is a subject of ongoing debate, though. Like lots of things, the answer is: it depends (on what they are, how Google feels about them on any given day, and lots of other factors).

Get Listed in Directories

Article directories help, especially when they’re of higher quality. Most article sites let you include a link back to your website, at least in the bio section at the bottom. Write a good article and you can definitely get lots of traffic this way. If you can’t write, carve out some of that budget for some quality freelance or PLR content. It will pay off.

Exercise Caution

Some backlinks can hurt you, though, so beware. Linking from one of your sites to the next is an idea the search engines caught onto long ago. It may not hurt much, but it typically helps very little. Link exchange ("you link to me and I’ll link to you") is another of those moves that long ago lost most of its value.

Getting links from spam sites is deadly. That’s one reason tools like Backlink Checker are worth using. Beware getting involved with link farms. You really can’t fool Google, Yahoo, et al. They’re experts at the game and have seen every dirty trick in the book. Play by the rules and you’ll be much better off.

Summary

PPC and other paid forms of search traffic generation are still viable and valuable, even for those with small budgets. But by exercising some creativity and good old finger sweat, you can take advantage of what’s out there for free. And, hey, doesn’t "free" sound like a good deal?

About the Author

David Long is a freelance writer and editor with over 20 years of experience. His PLR articles and eBooks have appeared on
hundreds of websites. They cover Wine & Beer, Travel, Gardening, Health & Fitness, Pets, Stocks & Bonds, and dozens more subjects. He can be contacted for hire at JDavidLong@gmail.com

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