Traditional search engine optimization (SEO) is a core component of Logical’s work in qualified traffic generation. But as the digital marketing landscape continues to evolve, this type of work has gotten less and less traditional and far more sophisticated and layered.
The reality is, searching doesn’t just happen on Google anymore. It happens on Instagram, Amazon, Pinterest, and the rising beast that is TikTok — just to name a few — and that indisputable fact matters for your SEO, organic social, AND creative strategies.
Logical spoke about The State of Search during our first-ever LMG Partner Event series, but the impact on our day-to-day work and marketing priorities have shifted significantly in just the last few months. Google core updates, the rising importance of brand cohesion, and a rise in organic social searches from online users are all contributing to the importance of coordinated strategies across SEO, organic social, and creative work.
So what does this mean for you, a marketer trying to juggle all three?
SEO is changing and requires us to center more than just keywords in our work. Organic social platforms, the changing nature of how we utilize creative, and more authentic, user-generated content are all key components of a strong organic strategy and they need to operate in lock step with one another.
We’re going to break down recent changes in the organic marketing landscape, and then dive into key components of SEO, organic social, and creative strategies.
First, let’s talk about what has NOT changed across organic marketing strategy this year:
- High quality content still matters. Logical defines this as content that adheres to E-E-A-T principles – experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. This is critical for improving website visibility and similar principles apply to organic social content as well (which indirectly boosts website SEO).
- “Know your audience” has never been more critical. Find your personas, understand what platforms they’re searching on, and create content geared toward them. Niche, expert-driven content boosts all the necessary signals for strong website SEO and translates to impactful content for your organic social calendar.
- Don’t neglect your brand. Even though people are more likely to buy from other people than brands, it doesn’t mean your brand should fall to the wayside. On the contrary, you should be invested in improving the authenticity of your brand and ensuring clear, cohesive differentiators are outlined across all marketing materials.
Now, to review what HAS changed:
- The importance of social proof. People buy from other people. The power of social influence cannot be underestimated and will always have an impact on consumer buying behavior. Brands have been steadily increasing their investments in influencer relationships this year, particularly with micro influencers, despite economic downturns.
- Solid creative strategies require short-form video content. Buyers are seeking out firsthand experiences and perspectives. User-generated content (UGC) and especially video content, is exceptionally important to signal authenticity and trust.
- Primary KPIs across organic channels. We still care about volume of keyword rankings and site traffic for SEO. But with a greater emphasis on brand recognition in key audiences comes more mid-top funnel KPIs — share of voice, branded searches, and post engagement help us (and Google) determine how valuable your content is to searchers. The online world IS a popularity contest after all.
SEO is Still Non-Negotiable
With the rise of AI search engines, 6 Google core updates in the last year, and Google’s attempts at launching generative AI chaos for search results, many folks are lamenting the end of SEO. To that, we say: nice try, haters.
SEO is simply changing — again. It will change a few more times in our respective lifetimes, so buckle up. It’s no longer just about keywords and site traffic. The very nature of SEO has expanded and the number of platforms that you can optimize for SEO have increased (yes, you can optimize for SEO across all social platforms, it just looks a little different than Google).
With all these changes, it can be easy to lose focus, but SEO still requires a tremendous amount of focus and consistency. The important things to keep prioritizing are improved website visibility and user experience to boost your brand. Don’t underestimate the impact of a strong landing page optimization or thoughtful internal linking strategy, but continue to expand your understanding of what SEO can be and what will provide the most authentic experience for your customers.
Organic Social is Becoming Increasingly Important
Google is still king of search, but signs point to younger generations potentially upending that in the future. Social searching is the second most popular method of finding answers online, followed by AI search engines.
It’s not just us saying this — there have been various studies done on online consumer search behavior as of late. Google itself has cited that 40% of young people choose Instagram or TikTok for search queries. Hubspot also reports 31% of consumers prefer to search on social platforms before Google, a demographic that is dominated by Gen Z and Millennials.
The data paints a picture that’s impossible to ignore — social platforms need to be maintained as part of your organic marketing efforts. Understanding where your customers and potential customers search, and taking steps to produce and showcase valuable content to them, especially on highly personalized social platforms, is paramount.
There are two key ways that social strategies play into the organic marketing ecosystem:
Social Signals and SEO Impact
Organic social “signals” refer to engagements and interactions with individual pieces of organic social content. When it comes to your website’s interplay with organic social platforms and content, Google has stated that there is no direct correlation between organic social signals and SEO, but Google has also shown us clear patterns of domains associated with high engagement social accounts performing well without having wildly sophisticated content or websites.
We cannot say for sure that social engagements directly impact the rank of your website, but they DO play a role in Google’s evaluation of your Authoritativeness and Expertise – and we know that impacts site ranking, as part of E-E-A-T. If your social channels have high engagement, that also signals to Google that your content is worth sharing AND you benefit from more traffic sources. The individual posts themselves can also generate their own organic rank, which helps take up more space in the SERP and provide direct answers to users.
Social proof and influencer marketing
We said it once, and we’ll say it again — people buy from other people. 62% of consumers want to see videos with real people before making a purchase. They’re looking for testimonials and direct proof of concept, ideally via short-form video.
That’s especially true for the booming influencer market. Influencers are individuals who have a strong presence on social media platforms where they engage with their followers through content deemed authentic and trustworthy. They have tremendous power to influence the purchasing decisions of others, and are ranked on social sites depending on their following, engagement rate, and relevance to individual users.
As an industry, influencer marketing is set to be worth $24 billion by the end of 2024, up from previous years — $16.4 billion in 2022 and $21.2 billion in 2023. Companies who have used influencer marketing in the last couple of years have reported strong ROI and plans to increase influencer marketing budgets in 2024.
While that number seems staggering, it is pennies compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars funneled into paid media advertising every year. Paid media is also a core tenant of Logical’s service offering, but we’ll be the first to tell you that it’s drastically more expensive than organic and influencer marketing, and can be tougher to leverage authentically (tip: a strong cross-channel content strategy makes this much easier!)
Authentic content and creative wins on any platform
This brings us to our final point. The very heart of organic work is defined by an authentic creative and content strategy. Creative is not just design — it’s branding, voice, and key messages, and consistent, authentic communication about your company differentiators. Your content is everything you produce that ladders up to that — blogs, videos, infographics, social posts. The list goes on!
A clear through line is critical for strong website content, organic social content, or influencer content — your brand and voice needs to be translated across channels AND recognizable to your audience in order to have a true impact.
Two key tips from us for improving your content and creative strategies
Ensure there’s clear focus across your creative, content, and SEO
The message you broadcast matters just as much as the channel you broadcast it on. When your core brand messages are unclear, disjointed, or inauthentic, the rest of your marketing suffers.
Logical firmly believes in the importance of “pillars” or elements of your brand that you can use to ground your content and creative strategies. When you choose a few areas to focus on instead of trying to be everything to all people, truly magical results occur in your marketing.
It’s also worth noting — as user experience has become more and more prominent in strong SEO strategies, great creative is necessary for increasing the value of SEO and content marketing. Brands need to stand out from AI-driven content and commit to content excellence with attractive, accessible, and valuable content for users. If you think a visual will help something make more sense for a user — it probably will, and Google will reward you for it! Take the time to build that infographic.
Prioritize simple creative and short-form video
“Great” creative doesn’t necessarily mean a hyper-polished, expensive, corporate campaign. In this case, we mean practical, and to the point. Users are looking for authenticity and firsthand experiences, ideally in the form of short videos. This goes hand-in-hand with the rise of micro over major influencers, as people seek out endorsements from niche communities of people they trust.
And short-form video doesn’t always have to be influencer content! Let’s take organic social strategies for brands for example — you might not have an influencer strategy in place or are just getting started on video. A great place to start is video testimonials with clients or with your employees — simply putting faces to the brand name goes a long way in curating more authentic relationships with your audience, and you don’t need a mass-produced video to do it.
And don’t skip the vertical video. Social platforms are practically blue in the face telling us to include more vertical, short form video in our asset variations because it gets more reach and engagement (that’s true for both organic and paid). On Instagram, Reels get a whopping 55% higher reach rate than Carousels or Static assets.
The digital marketing world is changing fast, and there’s a lot of noise about the future of SEO in particular. As a partner, Logical aims to help you focus on the things that matter, and put the things that don’t on the back burner until they do.
We’re excited about the future of organic marketing and the evolution of SEO. If this excites you or raises more questions for you, I’d love to chat either way. Book a meeting with me and let’s talk shop!
