Welcome To Your FREE

Internet Marketing Basics Class!

Welcome to Matt’s world of digital marketing, where the term ‘organic traffic’ is more than just a buzzword—it’s the backbone of a successful online presence. If you’re new to this concept, fear not, I will explain everything. This lesson is designed to demystify the fundamentals of organic and paid traffic, keyword research, and content writing to point you in the right direction — it’s good to understand what we’re dealing with here, especially if you’re trying to improve your situation!

What is Organic Traffic?

The internet is like a bustling city street; billions of people are online, and they’re all looking for something. For a site that gets little to no traffic, it’s money on the table that you’re missing out on! With a good website that has good content on it, Google and other search engines will start to pick up on the site and show it in the results. This is how you get organic traffic! The goal is to get into the top 10 for a given phrase with the right intent for a website’s offer (whether it’s a personal blog, a local business, a national business, or a service). The best part of this traffic method is that it is indeed free if you have the right strategy. That strategy is to meet the needs of somebody’s search and to align your content with your intent so that you get the right traffic. If you’ve ever seen how much people pay for ads, then you’d recognize this is an excellent way to get business in the door. 

This type of traffic is often considered the most valuable because it’s driven by users actively seeking what you offer. The quality of organic traffic is generally higher, with better engagement rates and conversion potential.

Organic traffic comes from well-written and helpful articles designed to answer the search that brings the user in. It requires you to do a little bit of reverse engineering to understand this concept, but basically, the search engine’s job is to match the search query as best as it can. You wouldn’t want to look up “how to get a stain out of satin” and see results for cleaning a carpet.

Keywords And Their Role in Organic Traffic & Search Engine Optimization

When users turn to search engines, they input specific terms or phrases to find what they seek. These terms are known as ‘keywords’. They range from single words to complex phrases and are the primary method through which search queries are conducted. The more accurately a website’s content aligns with these keywords, the more likely it appears in search results.

Keywords in SEO: Matching Content with Queries

SEO is the art and science of optimizing a web page to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Keywords play a pivotal role in this process.

Best SEO Tools For Beginners

• Keyword Research: This involves identifying your target audience’s terms and phrases. Tools like the Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Mangools can help you discover these keywords.
• Keyword Optimization: The next step is to figure out the best way to incorporate them into your content. This doesn’t mean shoving and stuffing your content with keywords with junk that doesn’t make sense. Google is more intelligent than that, and they will penalize your site by not ranking you! Instead, it’s about naturally integrating them into your titles, headings, main content, meta descriptions, and URLs.
• Long-Tail Keywords: These are longer, more specific phrases. They might have lower search volumes, but they’re often associated with more qualified traffic and higher conversion rates due to their specificity.

Paid Traffic

Paid traffic is exactly how it sounds, it’s traffic that you’re paying for generally on a per-click basis in the form of ads. If you’ve ever noticed at the top of Google, you’ll see Sponsored next to anything that was paid for.

For example, if you searched the term “divorce lawyer”, you’d see a lot of ads. And those ads would cost the company running them about $14 per click just to go to their website! As you can probably tell, if you have a few hundred people clicking on the ad that’s several thousand dollars owed to Google Ads!

This is why organic traffic is so powerful, because if you can show up for similar terms for free you can save a lot of money in the long run while also building a very robust online presence.

Paid Traffic: A Quick Boost with a Price

In contrast, paid traffic is generated through advertisements. Platforms like Google Ads or social media advertising allow you to pay to have your website displayed to a targeted audience. While paid traffic can provide a quick boost in visibility and is excellent for short-term campaigns, it doesn’t build long-term sustainability like organic traffic. It also happens to add up VERY QUICKLY if you aren’t careful because you’re paying PER CLICK. Effective PPC management involves careful budgeting and continuous adjustment. Advertisers must balance their bid amounts with the expected return on investment (ROI). They must also regularly adjust their strategies based on performance data, seasonal trends, and changes in the competitive landscape.

How Pay-Per-Click Works

In a PPC campaign, advertisers bid on relevant keywords. When a user searches for these keywords, search conducts an auction to determine which ads will be displayed. Ad position is determined by bid amount and ad quality. You can increase engagement and conversions by bidding high and creating quality ads.

Keyword Bidding and Its Dynamic Nature

The process of keyword bidding can be highly dynamic and competitive. The cost per click (CPC) for a keyword depends on several factors:

1. Demand: Popular keywords with high search volumes typically have higher CPCs (cost per click) due to more advertisers competing.
2. Relevance: Search engines also consider how relevant your ad is and the landing page quality relating to the keyword. Higher relevance can lead to a lower CPC.
3. Quality Score: Platforms like Google Ads assign a quality score based on your ad’s click-through rate, relevance, and user experience of the landing page (all visible on their platform). A higher quality score can help pull in the best traffic, saving money from people who are clicking and not interested in buying whatever you’re selling — making the ad campaign more efficient.
4. Industry Variations: Different industries have varying average CPCs. For example, highly competitive sectors like legal services or insurance often see higher costs.

• • Shortcutting CPC Costs with Great Keyword Research
    • We get into how to shortcut CPC costs in the next section, where we talk about keyword research and how to find low-competition keywords that inherently cost less money.

Backlinks: More Than Just SEO

Backlinks are inbound links from other websites, and they play a dual role in enhancing your website’s performance. Firstly, they contribute to your SEO efforts through ‘link juice,’ especially if the links are from reputable and relevant sources. For example, a backlink from a high-authority site like the New York Times would significantly boost your website’s authority and ranking potential compared to a link from a lesser-known or spammy site.

Secondly, backlinks are direct conduits of traffic. When your site is linked from platforms such as YouTube videos, other blogs, Facebook posts, Facebook groups, and other social media platforms, while unlikely to give you that ‘link juice,’ it can lead to a substantial influx of visitors, these visitors are often highly targeted as they come from a source of content related to your niche or industry.

Note on Buying Backlinks

Some people believe that buying backlinks is a good SEO strategy to push a website into the good graces of Google quickly, but it is something to be very careful with. Many of these backlink services provide low-quality backlinks from spammy sites advertised to have high domain authority. Investing in good, well-written content on your behalf would be better.

Diverse Sources, Diverse Audiences

The variety in backlink sources means a more diverse audience. Press releases, Medium articles, and other content-driven platforms can funnel a different segment of the online population to your site very quickly. This diversity is beneficial as it allows you to capture traffic that might not have been accessible through standard search engine queries.

Tailoring Traffic to Your Site’s Needs

Understanding your website’s goals and audience is the key to leveraging these different traffic types. For instance, are you blogging and sharing your life experiences or trying to sell a product? Is it a physical product, a digital download, a course, or an affiliate offer? Well, they all need careful consideration and a bit of experimentation to see what works best.

Each traffic source has strengths and caters to different user intents and demographics. By aligning your traffic acquisition strategies with your site’s purpose and audience, you can ensure that the traffic you attract is high in quantity, quality, and relevance.

Real World Example

Let’s say you want to sell kitchen knives; there is a great offer online that pays $40 a sale. What content should you make? Well, one of the simplest ways to go about it is to show the knives in action. So what if you made a video series that shows how to cut various foods? 

How To Optimize the Page?

Go directly after the keyword, of course! “How to cut a pineapple” would benefit from that being the title and the URL slug (yoursite.com/how-to-cut-pineapple) and would do well on a platform like TikTok, which is perfect for short-form content, a tendency to snowball followers if focused singularly on the niche. So you could write an article that lays out how to cut a pineapple, make a YouTube video and a TikTok video, post the YouTube video to the page, and then write out the instructions below along with still images to show exactly what you’re doing. 

This is one of the most ‘helpful’ ways to think about ranking in Google because this is what Google wants to see! 

Oh, and it gets a lot of searches and has very low competition!

Writing Content & The AI Revolution

Artificial intelligence has completely transformed the way our world works; now, they have AI in TVs, chatbots on websites use AI, there are AI-powered-automated YouTube channels, and written content can be written at the speed of light. 

But there is something that’s important to remember… AI is good at organizing information, but it is not yet good at fully grasping search intent. 

Some sites BLEW UP in the first year of using ChatGPT, but it was mostly spammy, junky content that wasn’t helpful. They were merely trying to flood their websites with content, get found on Google, and make as much money as they could FAST. And it worked! But it will not work now as Google and the other search engines are working to remove spammy content from their results.

Are the search engines going to kill all AI-created content? 

No. Google, Microsoft, and other search engines are developing their own AI tools; it is going to be essential for their business models moving forward. But they are doing a much better job at filtering junk content.

Can you make good content using AI? 

Yes, as long as it’s helpful.

AI-Driven Content Creation

1. Efficiency and Scale: AI can produce written content much faster than human writers. But it must be written to avoid getting flagged as spam or plagiarized content.
2. Data-Driven Insights: AI algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data to identify trends, and keywords. This data-driven approach helps create content that is more likely to engage and attract readers.
3. Personalization: AI can tailor content to individual preferences, enhancing user engagement.
4. SEO Optimization: AI tools can optimize content for search engines more efficiently, ensuring that keywords, meta tags, and other SEO practices are effectively implemented to improve search rankings.

Bringing The Lesson Together – Getting Started

1. Setting Up Your Website

• Choose a domain and hosting: Select a domain name that reflects your business or content and a reliable hosting service. Most hosting services provide the domain name for free as part of a hosting plan.
• Design your website: Use website builders or CMS platforms like WordPress to design a user-friendly and visually appealing site.

2. Acquiring Content: Writing or Buying

• Creating content yourself: If you have the skills and time, writing your own content can be rewarding. It allows for a personal touch and a deep understanding of your audience.
• Purchasing content: Consider buying content from freelance writers or content agencies for a quicker start.
  • If the intent is to sell something online, the content and keywords must align properly. Good content creators will have a profit strategy to recognize buyers’ intent within the keyword research, and create content around the subject which is more likely to result in a sale. 
• Balancing quality and quantity: Regardless of the method, ensure your content is well written! AI can work wonders, but it still needs to checked for plagiarism.

3. Leveraging AI in Content Creation

• AI writing assistants: Tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Bing CoPilot, or Content At Scale can help generate content ideas, create drafts, or even write entire articles based on your input. Content At Scale is an exciting service as it takes a keyword, does the research, crafts the article, and scans it for AI content detection and plagiarism all in one action.
• Enhancing content strategy: Use AI for more than just writing. Analyze data on user engagement and preferences to refine your content strategy.
• ALWAYS check your content before posting. Make edits, and ensure whatever it is you post is accurate and true!

4. Mastering Keyword Research

• Choose a keyword tool: Start with user-friendly tools like Google Keyword Planner or Mangools which is inexpensive.
• Learn the basics: Understand metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and search intent.
  • One of the best ways to do this is to search a popular article on something you know about to see what keywords they rank for. Google something, see what comes up number 1, and analyze why Google chose it to show up there. Is it a video? News? An ad? These are all huge clues! Put that first result into the keyword tool to see what it ranks for to get better insight into what else it shows up for 😉
• Apply keywords effectively: Use your researched keywords strategically in your content, titles, meta descriptions, and URLs.

5. Implementing SEO Best Practices

• On-page SEO: Make sure your content is focused on being helpful. Title tags, and meta descriptions matter but search engines are more interested in great content.
• Consistent content updates: Regularly update your website with fresh, relevant content to keep your site growing. It helps keep repeat visitors engaged and it signals to search engines that your site is active.

6. Continuous Learning and Adaptation

• Stay informed: SEO and digital marketing trends evolve constantly. AI came on the scene and completely changed the game in some ways. But instead of freaking out when the algorithm changes, keep Google’s business model in mind. Google makes its money from ad sales, which means they’re always going to push the most helpful and relevant content to the top, no matter what. If you keep that in mind, your job gets that much easier. Just focus on helping and explaining things as best as possible, and you’ll see that Google will reward you!
• Use analytics: Always monitor your website’s performance through keyword tools and with analytics to understand what pages are getting traffic. Iterate the site better, build it up into the powerhouse you want it to be! Patience, persistence, and a good strategy will get you far in life.

7. Seeking Help When Necessary

• Consult experts: If you hit a roadblock, don’t hesitate to seek advice from SEO professionals or digital marketing consultants.