In the world of search advertising, we identify two types:  paid and organic.

But increasingly, for business advertising agendas, organic is sounding like a euphemism.

Nobody who’s trying to advertise cares about organic traffic.  They often don’t even know what organic implies.

What they want is free traffic.   Traffic where there is no payment metric based on clicks or impressions.  A page one search ranking for a prime keyword where they can get traffic – in perpetuity – without having to “pay” for it.

This is the long held value proposition of SEO.  In fact, it used to be that businesses would plan only to use PPC advertising in the beginning of campaigns.  Then, when SEO rankings came into play, they’d drop the PPC expense and rely on their organic, free traffic.

The heyday for this strategy has come and gone.

Why?  Because increasingly – by Google’s design – there is no free advertising online.

If you want to promote your business and convert traffic with direct-response, conversion-based copy, they want you to pay for it.

It’s becoming almost impossible to organically rank webpages that have transactional goals.  The metrics used for rankings are weighed against transactional content.  For example, social media likes on a page improve its SEO.  But how many ordinary consumers “like” business sales pages?  How many share them?

Rather, it’s information rich, useful, entertaining content that carries strong engagement metrics that now ranks better organically.

Even the structure of the content plays into this.  Online conversion-based copy is short, focusing one one topic and one goal.  Brevity helps it convert, but hurts it with SEO because of the lack of informational depth.

Also, you used to be able to add fresh, keyword rich content onto a domain (mainly by blogging) and that content would help the main, promotional pages rank better.  But the algorithms seem to have advanced beyond this, tending to rank the most relevant individual webpages for a given search.

This is why there really is no free search advertising today.  You can’t really rank the content, either directly or by optimizing at the domain level.

It’s not hard to spot an ulterior motive from Google on this.  If you want to promote transactional content through search marketing, they want you to pay.  They have no vested interest in providing free advertising.

Google also points to user experience.  They know today’s online consumers do a lot of research, so much of the organic results are directed to that need.

So where does this leave SEO and free traffic?  One thing is that winning free traffic today has more to do with capturing leads in the information gathering phase of the buying cycle.  You have to create content with high informational merit to get high ranking, and that information must help the consumer with their buying decision.  It needs be unique, authentic, and useful.

Second, free traffic is now more about creating brand awareness than visibility for advertising copy.  Free traffic is more likely to engage consumers early in the buying cycle.  You inform, build trust, and remarket to keep your brand message in front of them.  Eventually, you win the opportunity to do your sales pitch.

You can do free informational marketing.  You can do free branding.  But advertising copy is difficult to get in front of consumers on free digital channels.  They aren’t looking for it, and the platforms aren’t inclined to show it.  Facebook and other social media platforms follow this same pattern.

If you want to sell, pay to advertise.  For brand-level marketing, organic works.

But don’t confuse them anymore.  Trying to rank your advertising pages for free isn’t worth it.

Instead, differentiate your content and reach consumers at all stages of the buying cycle.