We used to call it the ‘golden triangle’; getting on the top three searches was the aim. Startups and brands focused on content, and inbound marketing that focused more on content was a real thing. The content was king!
Every new business or brand had a blog, which was the mandate. Organic rankings and traffic were a traction channel.
The golden triangle is no more — doesn’t matter anymore is more apt.
When Facebook ads gained popularity, brands realized that reaching a larger audience with the right copy and a tiny budget was possible. The focus moved from content to ads.
This is good right, why not? Take the budget for creating content that requires time, energy and money to somewhere things move quicker.
New Google Eye Tracking Study Shows The Downfall Of The Golden Triangle
Facebook soon became a #1 traction channel for a lot of businesses.
Now, this wasn’t a problem until Facebook went rogue and started blocking ad accounts for no reason, and a lot of brands tasted the bitterness including the ones I was working with at the time.
There was no place to put the money at..
That is when along with a lot of people I realized traffic was plummeting without ads. It was a reckoning! We did not lay the foundation right.
Facebook was our #1 channel, and it is down.
Naturally, the panic kicked in and we started looking at alternate channels to put the money in.
Some worked, some did not. This is when I saw the golden triangle rulings. The long and ignored are now sorted after, again. We pumped up the AdWords — not good enough. Golden triangle took the major share of clicks.
We did not have the right content or enough content to compete for the golden triangle.
Going back and making things right
Quickly we realized the ‘hole’ and plans for a ‘patch’ were in motion. Unlike many then running to find a new channel that could work for them, we knew exactly what was the issue. The diagnosis was clear, “organic myopia” brands including ours focused a lot more on the short results and did not see far enough.
Don’t get me wrong, when I say diagnosis, performance marketing or even Facebook ads are not the diseases here. The d̶i̶s̶e̶a̶s̶e̶ deficiency was content. Wait, let me correct that again. — The organic channel focus deficiency.
The cure was simple, a team was assigned to kick back the social channels and start working on blogs. We now have a new source of traffic — engaged and converted.
Here are a few things that we did that you can do to get quick organic results –
1. Start a blog
Most fall under the impression that blogs take a lot of time to rank, and it’s often impossible to get enough to bring in leads. They are right and wrong at the same time. Right because google takes time to index and takes a while to pop on the 1st page. Wrong because they are not doing it right — NO! I am not talking about SEO and optimizations. Lack of community. That brings me to my second point
2. Get Social! — Facebook, Twitter, IG, Reddit and Discord
It’s hard to point at one and say and go for it, usually, there is always a platform that works for every brand.
a. Facebook (Meta)
Not a big fan of Facebook (I am sure you might have figured that by now) but it’s a great tool to find new people and get vocal.
-For personal brands and niche brands. Community is usually strong and engaging
-For creative brands (Art, music, design etc.). Facebook is a great place to get people to share their content and take feedback.
b. Instagram
Instagram is a different platform in many ways although it’s owned by Facebook. The platform is a lot polished and if your brand can make use of stories Instagram is the place.
c. Twitter
Not a lot of people know that Twitter has been growing over the years.
https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?type=text%2Fhtml&key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&schema=twitter&url=https%3A//twitter.com/stats_feed/status/1516326817199648770&image=https%3A//i.embed.ly/1/image%3Furl%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fabs.twimg.com%252Ferrors%252Flogo46x38.png%26key%3Da19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07
People, regardless of who they are (User or not), are very vocal and can bring in a lot of leads if done right.
Buymeacoffee.com is a good example — They focused on Twitter from the start and have a very engaging audience.
There are named brands with a blue tick and way less/no engagement.
Twitter is for everyone and missing out on Twitter would be a big mistake.
d. Reddit and Discord
A very good place to engage existing users. Although I believe these are channels that you should be focusing on in the later stages of your organic game. I have seen many NFTs use Discord from the beginning — because it made sense for them to start with that instead of Facebook or Instagram. Leads me to my next point.
Choose your channels thoughtfully. Don’t create a brand account so you can fill the footer with social links.
Sure, it looks good but when someone lands on a dead social media page — it’s just….You know that feeling.
Pick the ones that work burn the rest! Work on the ones you picked — brings me to the final point (This is the last. I promise)
3. Consistency
a. Gaming social media
Just post, especially on social media. Everything you say gets replaced by something. So it doesn’t matter if no one engaged the 1st time. Eventually, someone will like and the social media algorithm will show it to a few more if they like them your post is shown to more — it goes on until people stop engaging. This is how almost all social media platforms work, including Medium. Share and post till you make it.
b. Boosting and bringing more traffic to the blog page
If people spend more time on your page the page will rank higher for the search query they made to reach your page. The math is simple, don’t break your head around backlinks. SEO, by its nature, is black hat imo. It’s faking things to rank better. Links should be natural, keywords shouldn’t be stuffed.
Give something unique — Every time you write a post give something original and unique. Give your readers to stay, do something on the page. Forget ranking plan to engage readers.
c. Share it but don’t spam
Share your gems and don’t spam your social media. That being said, sharing on social media is a good idea. Traffic from social media brings crawlers to the page.
“Crawlers, indexing and ranking” is worth a full article. The pros have covered it, check it out — https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-search-engines-operate
Good content is shared, shared content brings more traffic.
Getting back on the organic gave us room to breathe while we figured out the ads. Soon we did, and now, we are happy that the ads failed us — We rediscovered organic content.
