It’s hopeless to demand results from an organic process. 

As you look into digital marketing, you’ll begin to hear the term organic search or organic seo.  You might also hear natural in place of organic.

Consultants will talk to you about getting more organic clicks, more organic traffic.

So what exactly, in the context of all these phrases, does organic mean?

First, it helps to clarify one thing it doesn’t imply:  free.  Organic clicks/organic seo does not mean free clicks.  Often, people associate organic with something that grows in the wild you could pick for free, like organic wild mushrooms.

No search marketing is free.  Either you work to earn traffic or you bid on paid search.

Instead, what organic denotes is the type of growth process.  Like a tree sapling or young human body, the growth process is dictated by a natural progression that you can’t alter.

And that’s the heart of the matter.  You might want to stand in your yard and order the grass to grow faster, but it can’t.  It hopeless to demand results from an organic process.

When marketers talk about organic search, what we mean is the type of results that you grow by developing a natural interaction with human users.  You tap into their needs, stimulate their interest, and find ways to amuse them.

As you grow your presence online – literally grow it – the algorithms that determine search placement grant you higher rankings.  Their goal is to display content that is a natural fit for what the user’s needs.  The more you make that match, the more your organic traffic grows.

Every once in a while, we still get a new business person who doesn’t understand what organic search traffic means.  They call, frustrated, three weeks after we start and wonder why they don’t see their new website on page one.  They fail to see that insisting on instant organic search results is as futile as standing in front of a tree and ordering it to grow faster.

We have to remind them that SEO is an organic process that takes time.  We start having conversations about where we are after three months, not three weeks.

Like a tree or body, when you nourish this process and give it time, growth is assured.  With quality content creation, traffic promotion, and time, your organic results will improve.

So give the process time.  When you grow your organic search results, the clicks are free.  The value of your content increases the longer it drives traffic.

But organic is not free or fast.  It’s a process where patience pays-off.