In February of this year, organic search via Google accounted for the 48.81% of referral traffic share. Facebook accounted for the 18.2% while Twitter and Pinterest accounted for the 0.82% and 1.05% respectively.
Added to organic search by Google are Yahoo’s and Bing’s. Yahoo accounted for 1.61% while Bing accounted for 1.21%. This is to say that organic search dominated referral traffic in social media delivering more than 50% of the overall traffic. Organic search is also considered the best converting of all channels.
With the aforementioned statistics, it is but high time that companies explore and improve their organic search ranking. Ironically, companies spend more on other media rather than implementing a comprehensive SEO strategy.
In 2011, the most used social media are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. According to the Social Media Marketing Industry Report, 92% of surveyed marketers put Facebook on top, followed by Twitter at 82%, and LinkedIn at 73%.
Organic search remains to be the least utilized and least funded medium despite its capacity to drive the lion share of traffic and convert visitors into customers.
The report, however, pointed out that improved search engine ranking was a priority among companies that are using social media for a year or longer.
The changeable nature of organic search rankings is probably one of the reasons behind businesses’ moderate use of the medium.
Maintaining company website ranking is hard work. Aside from varying rankings on a daily basis, millions of websites compete for a space in the first five pages of search results. This means that your company can do so much, and yet, if competing companies doubled on their efforts to increase their rankings at the same time, there is a possibility of no Return On Investment (ROI) on your part.
On another extreme, there is a possibility that a website’s traffic will increase more than 100%, and conversion will also be high impacting ROI positively.
Because of organic search’s nature, some businesses resort to pay-per-click advertising. However, advantages brought by pay per click are usually short-term. It only works while the marketer is paying. When the payment is stopped, the website disappears from the search results.
Moreover, around 75% of Internet users are skeptics about paid ads on a search engine results page. It’s because users know beforehand that an organic search results will bring them their desired information while paid search usually bring them an ad after another.
This is also true for reverse mortgage lead generation. Seniors who are usually interested with a reverse mortgage product do their online search. As such, those leads generated from organic search are the most likely to take the loan while those leads generated through pay per click or other promos like free items are most likely not to take the loan or may jump to another website and look for another free offers.
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