There’s No Middle Ground When It Comes to Fighting For Organic Traffic
Even though search engines like Google or Bing still show more results for cats (6,630,000,000) than dragons (2,820,000,000), ranking in their top 3 positions is as cut-throat, competitive, and brutal as any season of Game of Thrones. Cersei Lannister said it best, when it comes to SEO, “there is no middle ground.” If your site isn’t listed within the first 3 search results, you’re basically left to feed off of scraps. Any lower than the 1st page (i.e. top 10 results) and your website will likely be starving to death for organic traffic.
“2022 data from firstpage.com demonstrates that ranking #1 generates a typical CTR of 39.6%. That's more than double the CTR for 2nd position, 18.4%, and nearly 4x the CTR for 3rd position, 10.1%.” - smartinsights.com
SEO is a winner-take-all competition. Sure, you might get a trickle of organic traffic from lower ranking positions, but it’ll never be enough to justify your investment or generate a viable revenue stream. Unless you have a bottomless purse to spend on paid search traffic or happen to get lucky, then you’re going to be left with limited options:
OPTION ONE: Find a “niche market”.
This is a strategy that most “Marketing Gurus” have been touting in some form or another since the inception of capitalism. Of course, it makes perfect sense. If you can find a space where there’s lots of demand and limited supply, then you’re off to the races. Better yet, if you can create the demand before anyone realizes there’s a need for the supply, then you’ll easily take the lead.
While this advice is based on sound logic, it’s also somewhat dispiriting. Ultimately, saying someone should just go find a “niche market” or only try to rank for “low difficulty” long tail keywords is akin to telling them to give up. “Go home, you’re not good enough, find a lower tier league to compete with, and leave the serious business to the adults.” ONE BIG THING TO NOTE HERE: A “niche market” or “low difficulty keywords” are also only easy to capitalize on until the competition heats up. And, unfortunately, the competition always heats up.
OPTION TWO: Outbid the competition.
The internet is only free because of advertising. That advertising is part of the foundation of every search engine or social media platform where audiences exist. That means anyone with enough money can technically pay to reach more eyeballs than the competitor that outranks them organically. This is how the bulk of eCommerce businesses are able to succeed in highly competitive spaces.
However, don’t get us wrong here! We’re a digital marketing agency. We understand the fundamental value of digital advertising and how crucial it can be for smaller companies. The “pay-to-play” schema of the modern internet has enabled millions of small businesses to succeed by essentially taking out loans for search result positions or social media feed placements in order to get in front of the right audience at the right time. If you have the right messaging, the right creative, the right targeting, the right timing, and the budget to support all of the above, then paid digital marketing will likely be extremely lucrative for you.
“The average cost-per-click (CPC) in the marketing industry is $3.33 and the most expensive marketing industry keyword CPC is $165. (HubSpot via Ahrefs and WordStream, 2020) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)”
On the other hand (and most companies live “on the other hand”), paid advertising often requires a sizable budget to spend on testing, fine-tuning, and optimizing the “who, what, when, and where” of your approach. You can always pay for the eyeballs, but you can’t always guarantee you’re showing the right thing to the right eyeballs at the right time and place. If you rely solely on a paid digital approach, you’re putting most of your cards in the hands of the advertising engines and hoping things will go according to plan. Not to mention the debilitating decline of advertising algorithms and attribution over the past few years!
“527 million people used mobile browsers that block ads by default in 2019 — a 64% increase from the last edition of the report. (Blockthrough, 2020) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)”
So, that brings us to… OPTION THREE: Fight to Win!
That’s right! We’re not suggesting that it’ll be easy or free or immediate. But we are saying that SEO is a game that can be won (or at least played effectively), despite the odds being stacked against you. It’s not worth going in half-baked or unprepared, but it is worth fighting for.
Like most games, there are rules, there’s a referee, and there’s an audience. Additionally, like most games, there are certain “boxes to tick” which can give you a competitive edge. When you align your approach in a way that ticks all of those boxes, then you can start to generate the same type of forward momentum that you see in all of those classic underdog sports movies.
Ok, then what are those boxes and how do you tick them? The best way to understand this is to look at the companies that are currently winning the SEO game. Let’s start with a handful of the top websites based on overall U.S. search traffic: Youtube, Facebook, Amazon, Reddit, Instagram, & Wikipedia.
(via semrush.com)
Off the top of your head, what do you think all of these websites have in common? HINT: The answer isn’t that they are all major tech companies with billions of dollars at their disposal (although that certainly helps). The real answer is that they are all successfully overcoming at least 2 of the 3 fundamental hurdles of the SEO game. Each of these websites are consistently within the top 15 most visited websites in the entire U.S. because they are comprehensive, connected, and engaging.
What do we mean by “comprehensive”?
Simply put, being comprehensive means listing or including as many of the relevant things to your topic or industry as possible. For example, a comprehensive website for a sneaker company would certainly include listings for their products, but would also have countless articles about the materials, history, utilization, and any other offshoots of information relating to their products. To become 100% comprehensive is ultimately impossible. But the closer you get, the more likely you are to dominate the space you’re hoping to rank for.
Consider a couple of the examples given above, like Reddit or Wikipedia. These sites are so comprehensive they are literally bursting at the seams with topics related to topics related to topics ad infinitum. This immense extensivity is what lays the groundwork for their SEO success.
(An image estimating the size of a printed version of Wikipedia as of March 2020 (from an automatically updated image based on using volumes of Encyclopædia Britannica with a silhouette of an average man for scale)
These organic traffic behemoths are propelling their rankings by feeding the “referee” or “judge” of the game (i.e. the search engine algorithms) an abundance of “crawlable” content. Still, an important thing to note here is that not all content is created equal. The sheer mass of their databases isn’t the only reason they are two of the top most visited sites of all time.
This brings us to the next SEO fundamental: connectivity
All of these top ranking sites aren’t just consisting of disparate threads that sprout out from a central node. Instead, their comprehensiveness is tied together through their connectivity. Each topic or article or post is linked to one another in as many ways as possible. Rather than having loose strings that spread out into the ether, these websites consist of massive webs of information that reflect the core structure of the internet as a whole. They are comprehensive AND connected, providing the perfect jumping off point for the final hurdle in the game of SEO.
(via Indra Intelligence thru moz.com)
The final piece of the SEO puzzle… engagement
Even if you have a website that’s as comprehensive and connected as Wikipedia, it won’t be enough to outrank other sites unless actual people want to spend time on it and engage with it. While search engine algorithms love to see lots of content that’s interwoven like a web, the quality of the content and the user experience involved also play a critical role in their ultimate assessment of your rankings.
Again, we can look to some of these top ranking sites to demonstrate our point. Each of these companies is able to tout extremely positive numbers when it comes to three crucial metrics: more pages per visit, longer average visit durations, and lower bounce rates. In most cases, all of these markers of engagement will be directly correlated to the comprehensiveness and connectivity of a site.
Let’s say you search for a topic and a Wikipedia article shows up as a result. The bulk of the time, that article is going to be relevant enough to your search topic that you won’t immediately bounce from the site (i.e. lower bounce rate). As you read through the article, you’ll likely find several relevant links to other articles hosted on separate pages (i.e. more pages per visit). And, as you continue down your research path, you’ll typically find yourself spending much longer on Wikipedia than you would have on any other website with a random one-off blog post (i.e longer average visit durations).
(via hubspot.com)
This beautiful combination of comprehensiveness, connectivity, and engagement works to give the algorithm and the internet user exactly what they are looking for. It’s the entire concept that the internet is essentially built around. If you can accomplish that, then you can start to build momentum through the external links that will inevitably be created to reference your site’s information across the web. And once that’s in play, your rise to the top will become unstoppable.
So how do we emulate, optimize, & implement this SEO strategy?
Ok, I know what you’re thinking. You’ve asked us how you can get to space and we’ve basically told you to just go build a rocket. Not super helpful on a practical level. Don’t worry though, we’ll get there. And we’re not just going to aim to reach a single star, we’re going to map out our own constellation.
First, there’s one more thing we should look at which most of these top ranking companies have in common. It’s their reliance on comprehensiveness and connectivity in order to drive better engagement. The bulk of the websites that rank high in any industry or topic suffer from old age, bloat, and the inability to make rapid, meaningful changes to their user experience. Most of them got to their positions first or forced their way to the top, and have subsequently relied on user generated content and outdated design practices to continue to expand their tangled webs of information to feed the algorithms.
(Social media sites rely heavily on optimizing their content for a “more engaging” user experience, leading to more time spent on their sites and better SEO)
On the other hand, the millions of other websites that are attempting to win the SEO game are often barely dipping their toes into the water at best. The traditional approach of writing hundreds of blog posts, doing endless technical SEO audits, and spending countless hours trying to get quality backlinks is rarely worth the time and effort. Remember, this is a cut-throat competition. Only the top 3 results truly matter. After all, there’s a reason we don’t give 4th place medals at the Olympics.
(Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/)
So, what if we could flip the script? Imagine if you could take the comprehensive and connective nature of a site like Wikipedia and skyrocket the user engagement through a modern and nimble approach to design, scalability, and a focus on community. Imagine if you could own a comprehensive and connected web of content that was fine-tuned in every possible way to your core audience. Rather than merely hoping to be indexed as a single star in the sky, what if you could create, grow, and manage your own constellation? What if you could own a perfectly crafted piece of the internet?