Your Website is Growing an Organic Keyword Footprint Every Day.

Make sure you’re growing what you want to grow. Make sure it’s helping your business grow.

The idea of an “organic keyword footprint” for a website is actually a pretty simple concept, if you think of your website like a garden – so in this gardenside chat, we talk about a simple way of thinking about your website content in a way that should, I hope, help you grow the garden that helps your website attract the search traffic you really want…search traffic that is looking for whatever your business offers.

If you want to be known as a daisy garden, for instance, then you want to plant daisies. And the more daisies you plant – more colors, more varieties, larger quantities – you become a destination garden people start to hear about and come to, and then share their experience at your garden with others.

So think of your website the same way: identify what you want people to find you for, then plant and water and grow that content on your site. Over time, that content will take seed, and get indexed, and be discovered. And when people visit your site and love it, they’ll share it with their connections, and your reach will grow and grow.

“What if there are a lot of daisy gardeners near me?”

In other words: what if you are surrounded by similar businesses all working to appear for similar Search terms?

The short answer is: be a better gardener.

Grow what makes your garden unique – after all, if your garden is exactly the same as your competition, then why would someone come to you instead? If you don’t offer anything different to your customers than your competition, then maybe that’s something you need to start with before you worry about your organic search rankings. 🙂

In website terms, that means write stronger content that grabs your reader and sucks them in to read your whole page (driving reader engagement, which Google loves!). Include properly named & tagged and captioned photos and videos (leverage different media). Give your visitor more to enjoy, more benefit from coming to your site than your competitors…

In addition to that, there are technical things like making sure your website loads fast, fast, fast…don’t make people wait to get in and wander around. Page Speed, among many other things, is an important Search Ranking factor.

Make it easy for your visitors to share about their visit: include social share buttons, and encourage site visitors to share your content with their connections. Social signals contribute to your overall ranking as well – it “proves” that people find the content you provide to be valuable enough to recommend to their connections…it’s online “word of mouth” and is a vote for the quality of your content.

Help Your Organic Keyword Ranking with Additional Marketing Channels

You can also benefit from getting the word out yourself, especially in areas you have particular competition: post summaries and links back to your site pages on your social profiles, send press releases, supplement your organic footprint with strategically executed PPC campaigns – and make sure you track it all through something like Google Analytics to monitor the impact of your activities.

But always – always – start by growing the most beautiful garden you can.

I’s YOUR garden – so make it beautiful! 😉