What is Organic Digital Marketing?

Organic digital marketing

Being new to marketing, and digital marketing in particular, can be daunting. Seasoned marketers like myself are guilty of throwing around terms and acronyms and thinking that everyone around us knows what the heck we are talking about. It turns out they don’t, because why would they? It takes time and being around other marketers and reading lots of marketing content to become familiar with these terms.

With so many terms bandied about, it’s not possible to immediately know every single term off the top of our heads, and now I’m no longer insecure about my own abilities I am not afraid to say “hey, what does that stand for again?”. But I know how awkward it can make junior marketers feel when struggling to follow conversations filled with unique marketing terms. So let’s explore one of the most popular terms in digital marketing. The term “organic”.

What is organic digital marketing?

To make it easier to remember what organic means in the context of digital marketing, it helps to remember that the opposite word is “paid”. This means that organic basically means any marketing activity that we don’t pay for financially. Organic growth is growth that occurs due to efforts that have not been paid for.

Obviously organic efforts do cost us in many other ways - such as time invested, efforts made and ideas birthed. But anything achieved organically has not been paid for monetarily.

Organic activities you can do on your website

When we think of ranking in search, there are two ways to do this - organically with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques and through PPC (Pay Per Click).

SEO techniques include optimising the content on your website to rank for particular search terms. For example, if you had a women’s fashion ecommerce store you might want to ensure you cover search terms such as “women’s fashion”, “ladies fashion” and also terms linked to individual products types. If you stock jeans for plus sized women, you perhaps want to rank for “plus size denim”, “women’s plus size jeans” and other related terms. In order to do this you would make sure these sorts of terms are included within your product page for applicable products.

It’s also important to ensure all titles and meta descriptions on your website accurately describe what your page is about. Succinctly summarise what the reader will find when they land on your site to further boost your organic rankings.

In the old days of digital marketing, it was common for websites to keyword stuff, where they would put a particular keyword or term repeatedly throughout the web page. As Google evolved, they didn’t like this and today it is recommended that you write content for the human reader, so let them know in a way that reads naturally to a human that this page is about “women’s plus size jeans”, and quality content will rank well organically without being stuffed to try to fool Google.

Organic activities you can do off your website

Link building is a way to increase the domain authority of your website. In the old days (again!) it was common for people to buy backlinks of websites that existed just to link to other websites and charge you for the privilege in order to cheat google into thinking they were popular. Google evolved again and penalised sites that did this by pushing them lower down in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

However, link building organically is a good way to signal to Google that you have a website that other respectable websites believe to be valuable. For example, a link from bbc.co.uk will give your website a nice boost as they have a high domain authority, whereas a link from a smaller website or internet directory for example hasn’t got as big a reputation in Google’s eyes to give it a boost to the same extent.

A good way to get quality domains to link to your site is to contribute to other websites with good content. Perhaps your business is a specialist in your own field, contributing to news and industry websites by guest blogging or providing articles linking back to your website is a great link building activity that can give you an organic boost in the SERPs.

Content marketing

Ever heard the phrase “content is king”? It’s a popular phrase bandied about by marketers because writing quality content that is useful to the reader is a great way to organically boost your presence in the search engines.

Content marketing is great because you can do it in any field or business. Whatever your website is about, people have questions. Think of your customers questions and pain points and write articles and blogs to discuss and solve those problems. A website that sells DIY supplies could do a whole range of content marketing based on “How to” questions - how to upcycle a dining set, how to lay vinyl flooring etc. people will come to your site for answers to these questions and when your article helps them, they may come back when they are looking for products you sell.

This was a very short and simple introduction to what is organic digital marketing and the types of ways you can increase your rankings organically, there are lots more ways to boost site visibility so stay tuned as we continue to explore those areas!