Getting the most out of your organic traffic each month

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Community Plugs

• Yasmin Morrison is looking for a Demand Gen Manager for their marketing team. If you have experience owning demand at a startup, message her at yasmin@resoundconsulting.com

• The team at Linear is also hiring. Check out this tweet by Cristina Cordova for more info about the roles (Marketing Lead + Content Marketing Manager).

• Cerby is hiring a Head of Marketing to start in Q3. To learn more about the opening, please check out this document.

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Editors Note

Long time no see. Today we have a guest post by Nate from TenSpeed. There are a lot of conversations about SEO changing because of LLMs. I refuse to call them Artificial intelligence because Large Language Models don’t intuitively know what the words mean. They are spitting out words. True Artificial Intelligence is when machines fully understand & comprehend what they say. 

Meaning of intelligence a side - LLMs are reshaping industries, but SEO is still important & a big driver for many businesses. Below, Nate writes about SEO & getting the most out of it. 

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Getting the most out of your organic traffic each month

If you talk to any decent demand gen or performance marketing person, you’ll typically understand that some part of their playbook or process includes improving conversion rates. 

They optimize landing pages, A/B test alternative messaging and imagery, and even modify the offers or signup flow if necessary. 

Now think about how your conversations typically go with folks responsible for content marketing and/or SEO. A lot of times, you’ll hear more about traffic, rankings, impressions, and social metrics. Non-paid channels, organic search in particular, have the ability to drive large volumes of leads, pipeline, and revenue, yet the efforts tend to stop once the traffic has made it to the site. Why?

The biggest driver with this is the “on to the next one” mentality that takes shape in a lot of content & SEO roles. You’re trying to build the next piece of content or rank for the next query, always building and building and building.  

Ultimately, the result is a lot of missed opportunities to translate organic traffic into audience growth, leads, and revenue. So, I’ve put together some of my recommendations and learnings from leading all acquisition efforts (paid & non-paid) for Sprout Social to help you get the most out of your organic traffic each month.

Sizing up the opportunity

First, I like to use a thought exercise to help people appreciate just how much opportunity is being missed every single month. Here are a few examples that might fit your situation.

• If you receive about 1,000 organic visits per month, this is similar to an average packed-out high school basketball game. 

• If you receive about 30,000 organic visits per month, this is similar to the low-end average of MLB game attendance.  

• If you receive more than 80,000 organic visits per month, this is similar to NFL or Rose Bowl game attendance.

• If you receive 150,000+ organic visits per month, this is similar to attendance at major festivals like Lollapalooza or Coachella.

Take the one that is closest to your monthly traffic numbers and imagine yourself being there, looking around at the crowd of people. Now, imagine they are all there to read your content, check out your product, and do whatever else you hope people will do on your website. 

Would you be satisfied with less than 1% of the traffic doing something and the rest leaving without anything? Or would you be working hard to capitalize on that massive amount of interest and getting as much as possible from it?

What to do 

I’m not advocating for trying to convert them all because that isn’t the point of content and SEO, but there are more things to do than just get them to sign up and buy. Here are 5 ways to get more value from your monthly organic traffic.

• Additional resources:
  Organic traffic can lead to a lot of one-and-done visits. They land on your site, read the page they are on, and then leave. Being thoughtful about internal linking, additional resource CTAs, and even embedded content like podcasts and videos can help draw visitors into more of your resources.

• Retargeting:
  Similarly, running retargeting campaigns can help you put additional content and resources in front of folks who didn’t stick around long enough to understand everything you have to offer. Don’t measure the success purely on leads and revenue and make sure that you have some campaigns that are focused on putting more of your best content in front of them.

• Build your audience:
  You worked hard to get organic traffic to your website, so why not go a step further and build your own audience? Allowing people to subscribe to your newsletter, podcast, social channels, or YouTube channel can ensure that you stay in front of them and increase your future distribution.

• Survey/Feedback:
  I know for a fact that if you were in a stadium full of people interested in your company, you’d be making some effort to collect feedback from them. So why not do that on your website? You can ask what types of content they are looking for, lead them to a larger survey you are building, ask for product feedback, and so many other types of valuable information for your company.

• Alternative CTAs:
  No matter how much we want everyone to follow the neat little funnel we drew on a whiteboard, the reality is that people want and need to research and evaluate in different ways. If you have a free trial, consider testing a demo request CTA in places where the free trial CTA isn’t working (and vice versa). You can also test other things, like SDRs answering questions via live chat. Just because the traffic isn’t jumping on your primary offer doesn’t mean they won’t engage another way. 

Maintaining focus on business impact

At the end of the day, a lot of this boils down to keeping a focus on business impact and not vanity metrics. It’s great to get traffic and build the brand, but organic traffic is nothing more than just traffic if it isn’t somehow leading toward additional engagement, audience growth, or conversions. 

If you are desensitized to how many people are visiting your site every month, take a moment to visualize all of those people in one place and then work through some of the ways that you can balance your approach and harness the full potential of your organic traffic to help your company grow.

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