Now, it is not that these sites are not interested in Google users.  In fact, they have hired us to help them increase their share.  However, they are getting so much traffic from sites like Facebook that it seems there is less urgency about attracting this traffic and less willingness to change the site to meet organic standards.  Not long ago, sites would urgently and unquestioningly abide by Google’s standards to court that traffic. 
The first is that you look at who are your current customers, who are your prospects, what groups are they in, and join those same groups if they’re relevant and not too title specific to a marketer or a different field that you’re not in.  But really starting with the folks that you already are working with and using them to figure out which groups are most relevant.  This is also especially important because I think it was about a year ago, LinkedIn now made all the groups private.  So you can’t go in and look at what’s going on in the group.  And it’s really hard to know which ones are the best ones to join just by doing simple searches on say the title of the group.  So, start with the folks that you know. 
I have always believed in good quality content, well structured and written in a way that isn’t just about promotional talk.  Thanks for sharing this information with us, it’s always helpful to have everything written in a concise manner so we can remind ourselves now and again of what it takes to increase organic traffic.  As an SEO consultant myself I come across websites all the time that are messy and still using tactics that have long been out of date.  Having a successful website is all about quality content and links.  I like it that you stated what the problem was and then how you fixed it for the client.  Great article. 
I'm thinking about "less to do" (linking-social media) sites with physical products … Amazon and other merchants.  And adding a PPC campaign instead of using social media and constantly toiling away building links and writing articles.  Is there an easy way to get sites like this to rank while profiting with some paid traffic?  Your opinion on this dilemma .. SEO vs PAID traffic or both would be much appreciated. 
So for the last 19 years or 20 years that Google has been around, every month Google has had, at least seasonally adjusted, not just more searches, but they've sent more organic traffic than they did that month last year.  So this has been on a steady incline.  There's always been more opportunity in Google search until recently, and that is because of a bunch of moves, not that Google is losing market share, not that they're receiving fewer searches, but that they are doing things that makes SEO a lot harder. 

Implementing organic search engine optimization is a lot for one person to take on.  It’s especially difficult if you’re not familiar with things like keyword research, backlinks, and HTML.  Taking the time to teach yourself about SEO can be rewarding, but hiring an SEO company helps you save your time and effort so you can do the things you’d rather be doing.  Contact us today to schedule a time to talk about how we can improve your organic search engine optimization. 

Check out the average CPC for some top industries.  These are the costs of one click.  Mind you, that’s a click that is not guaranteed to convert a customer.  With paid campaigns, you have to keep optimizing and testing the ad creative to lower your CPC and increase your CTR.  You can imagine that it takes a massive budget to even set a paid campaign in motion.  And it requires just as much to keep maintaining it. 
I think for agencies as far as how we appear in organic search ourselves, we are definitely going to need to leverage all 3 of the solutions you talk about and agencies who haven't branded their products/services are going to have to do that and are going to have to also employ branding strategies.  In addition, we have to optimize for other search ares like you say in your point #2 and we must look at optimizing existing content for voice search and answers/featured snippets like you say in point #3. 

Paid social media is anything that is influenced by advertising dollars spent.  Any post in your news feed that has the “Sponsored” tag is paid social media.  If you then “like” that post, that is considered a paid reaction.  Paid social media includes boosted posts, ads optimized for clicks, lead generation forms, video ads, among other objectives, and can be targeted by a variety of demographic and behavioral factors. 

If you take full advantage of social media to promote your top quality content, you want to keep in mind that engagement matters for SEO.  Engagement helps to not only improve your online reputation but also to make connections and generate leads for your business.  Content that gets tons of engagement on social media platforms will rank for the topics they cover.  According to Moz, “to determine success, an algorithm looks at whether users engaged.  If more people engage that’s a clear sign that their algorithm is showing this right content; if not, their systems will audition other content instead to find something that generates that interest.” 
Quick question.  Do you ever click on the paid results when you conduct a search?  It turns out, most users don’t.  People typically bypass paid results and click on the top organic results.  I get it.  They’re looking for the most relevant and trustworthy answers to their problems.  A top result that appears to be bought doesn’t appeal to them as much as an organic result.  That’s where the credibility factor comes into play.  It’s why 75% of clicks are organic. 
Novelty wears off.  Even if people aren’t getting sick of your ads, your product itself will become less revolutionary over time.  When Casper launched, a direct-to-customer mattress-in-a-box company was a hot new take on the traditional sleep industry.  Now there are so many competitors that the idea of a mattress showing up at your door in a box just isn’t as exciting. 
Every one of those engagements can amplify a post tenfold depending on the size of their network.  And really you’re educating them on, ‘Hey, when you engage with our content, you’re not only just liking the content, but you’re opening that content up to all of your network, which can ultimately help with building the business’ bottom line, getting more awareness, which in turn drives more leads, and helps move people down the funnel, they build trust when they see your name more often.’ 
Remember that users enter search words into search engines based on their interest.  The matching keywords and phrases you choose for your campaigns help determine if your ad will display when users search online.  But be aware, other advertisers may also be using the same keywords.  That creates competition with your ad campaign.  What can you do to win?  One solution is keyword bidding. 
An organic marketing strategy generates traffic to your business naturally over time, rather than using paid advertising or sponsored posts.  Anything you don’t spend money on directly – blog posts, case studies, guest posts, unpaid tweets and Facebook updates – falls under the umbrella of organic marketing.  That email blast you just sent out?  Yup, that’s organic.  So is that user-generated content campaign you just launched. 
To do this, I often align the launch of my content with a couple of guest posts on relevant websites to drive a load of relevant traffic to it, as well as some relevant links.  This has a knock-on effect toward the organic amplification of the content and means that you at least have something to show for the content (in terms of ROI) if it doesn't do as well as you expect organically. 
In order to optimize your SEO results, it’s important to measure the impact of your efforts on web site traffic and lead/sales generation.  Google Webmaster Tools can give you important insight into how your site is functioning and identify potential errors you should correct.  An analytics tool such as Google’s Universal Analytics is helpful for measuring changes in search traffic as well as tracking visitors interactions with your web site that are a direct result of SEO.  Marketing automation tools and call tracking tools can help you tie leads and sales back to SEO. 
Organic marketing, of course, is different from outbound or paid marketing.  Outbound marketing seeks to place advertising and promotional content in front of people who are not looking for it.  In our era of big data, the ability to target advertising has blurred the line between in and outbound marketing slightly.  Paid marketing is good at generating traffic when it is needed.  However, organic marketing will continue to provide leads over time without the need to continue to spend on advertising. 
Publishing quality content on a regular basis can help you attract targeted organic search traffic.  But creating great content that gets ranked higher in the search engines isn’t easy.  If your business doesn’t have the necessary resources, developing strong content assets can prove to be a challenge.  Which affects your ability to have a working content strategy. 
Online Marketing Challenge (OMC) is a unique opportunity for students to get real-world experience creating and executing online marketing campaigns for real nonprofits using a $10,000 USD monthly budget of in-kind Google Ads advertising credit through the Google Ad Grants program.  This global academic program brings two worlds together, partnering students and nonprofits, to support digital skill development and drive positive change around the world. 
An important thing to note is the effect that localized searches will have on search engines.  For example, say you’re in Atlanta and you’re looking for a photographer for your wedding.  When you search “wedding photography” it wouldn’t be helpful to see results of photographers in Los Angeles.  This is why Google takes into account where you are when you search for certain words, and shows you listings from businesses that are close in proximity to you. 
If you've never been on Product Hunt before, it's like a daily Reddit feed for new products.  Products get submitted to the community and they're voted on.  Each day products are stacked in descending order based on how many votes they've had.  Ranking at the top of the daily list can result in thousands of conversion-focused traffic to your site, just as the creator of Nomad List found out. 
Blair Symes is the Director of Content Marketing at DialogTech, the leading provider of marketing analytics for phone calls.  Over the past 20 years, he has published hundreds of articles and eBooks on a wide range of marketing topics, including phone call analytics, conversion optimization, and omni-channel attribution.  He can be reached at bsymes@dialogtech.com. 
SEM is the wider discipline that incorporates SEO.  SEM includes both paid search results (using tools like Google Adwords or Bing Ads, formerly known as Microsoft adCenter) and organic search results (SEO).  SEM uses paid advertising with AdWords or Bing Ads, pay per click (particularly beneficial for local providers as it enables potential consumers to contact a company directly with one click), article submissions, advertising and making sure SEO has been done.  A keyword analysis is performed for both SEO and SEM, but not necessarily at the same time.  SEM and SEO both need to be monitored and updated frequently to reflect evolving best practices. 
We are an experienced and talented team of passionate consultants who live and breathe search engine marketing.  We have developed search strategies for leading brands to small and medium sized businesses across many industries in the UK and worldwide.  We believe in building long-term relationships with our clients, based upon shared ideals and success.  Our search engine marketing agency provides the following and more:
Aggressive "answer" boxes.  So you search for a question, and Google provides not just necessarily a featured snippet, which can earn you a click-through, but a box that truly answers the searcher's question, that comes directly from Google themselves, or a set of card-style results that provides a list of all the things that the person might be looking for. 
The last thing you need to do is evaluate the results and simply do it all over again.  You will need to be constantly reassessing your organic marketing plan.  The situation, audience, and goals will be constantly changing.  Your marketing plan will need to change to adapt to this flux.  You should reevaluate your organic marketing strategy at least every quarter. 
The Featured Snippet section appearing inside the first page of Google is an incredibly important section to have your content placed within.  I did a study of over 5,000 keywords where HubSpot.com ranked on page 1 and there was a Featured Snippet being displayed.  What I found was that when HubSpot.com was ranking in the Featured Snippet, the average click-through rate to the website increased by over 114%. 

Those who provide the valuable information, which reduces risk and increases reward to those receiving it, are rewarded if what they say is true and creates a good experience.  This is law of reciprocity (as mentioned in the book Influence) basically says give to receive, which is a universal truth.  This sense of indebtedness, of owing someone, is tracked in our brains and feelings, in most part hidden from society.  It can be explicitly tracked and accounted for using technology, like affiliate links.  Affiliate links are provided to referrers to refer others to a product or service.  When potential buyer completes an action leading to or completing a transaction, the referrer receives an affiliate commission.  As simple as that sounds, there are a lot of risks that can happen along the way, such as refunds, frozen funds, and click fraud.  xDSpot handles these risks better than any other affiliate tracking system out there, making it the preferred brand for those in the know. 

Go to local events or Meetup events and connect with bloggers in your industry.  An example of an event I run to connect with bloggers and people in the online marketing word is: http://www.meetup.com/Online-Marketing-Sydney/. Make friends first and then try to gain guest posts later.  I am not really a fan of websites which are flooded with guest posts one after another; it is the type of thing which Google is just waiting to target. 

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether.  Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review.  One example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices.[53] Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.[54]

For a long time, digital marketers summed up the properties of direct and organic traffic pretty similarly and simply.  To most, organic traffic consists of visits from search engines, while direct traffic is made up of visits from people entering your company URL into their browser.  This explanation, however, is too simplified and leaves most digital marketers short-handed when it comes to completely understanding and gaining insights from web traffic, especially organic and direct sources.