The tipping point is a term we’ve coined to describe when your organic search traffic chart shows a steep climb up. You know, real traction. Here’s an example: Granted, the above was an extraordinary case. If you want to watch the full case study on how we achieved such fast growth for that client, check out our YouTube channel.

Table of Contents 

• How Does the SEO Tipping Point Work

• How Does the Tipping Point Happen?

• What Causes the Tipping Point to Occur?

• How to Make the Most Out Of Your Organic Search Traffic?

• What to Do Next

How Does the SEO Tipping Point Work

In our experience, rapid growth in search traffic usually comes when a website starts to rank in the top 20 results. For example, here are the keywords that the above-mentioned website was ranking for right before they hit their tipping point:

And here are their keyword rankings a week later:

This is what their keyword rankings look like now:

Here are some observations:

• The number of keywords the site is ranking for doubled within a week

• They began ranking for high-volume keywords in the top 3 positions on search engine result pages

How To Hit Your Tipping Point

If you would like to cost-effectively move the needle on your SEO program, you should check out our Validate program. We will produce 10 SEO-optimized articles over 30 days for $300, showcasing to you how we build SEO momentum & tipping points. Are you curious to see how the Validate program works? Schedule a call with us. We take on 3 new companies in our Validate program every month and are usually booked out a few months in advance, so reserve your spot today!

How Does the Tipping Point Happen?

Building a healthy organic search program can be a real challenge. Search engines look at your performance in search result pages (content quality, click-through rate, bounce rate, etc) when deciding how high to place your pages in search results. Here are the different high-level components that play a key role in getting SEO traction – and ultimately hitting the tipping point.

Keyword Research

This is the strategic component behind every successful organic search program. Just like the regular business world, this involves taking a look at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). This means you have to see what your existing organic search traffic and keyword rankings are like and brainstorm related topics. The reason for that is that Google is a semantic search engine, their algorithm has a very good idea of the topics that you are uniquely positioned to create content around after they scrape your web pages. Next up is taking a look at your competitive landscape, and getting a sense of the level of opportunity. This means gauging the level of organic traffic your competitors generate, the types of keywords they rank for, and how high they rank. There is also a qualitative component here, where you will want to gauge the quality of their content – because poor content on their end is your opportunity!

Content Production

This part is more art than science. Good content is something that search engines, and readers alike will appreciate. The simple guiding light here is that you want to create content that addresses the searchers’ intent.

For reference, Google’s mission statement is:

Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. That’s why Search makes it easy to discover a broad range of information from a wide variety of sources

Google

For Google to maintain its dominance in the search engine market, they have to do a world-class job of curating excellent search experiences for users and helping them find all of the information that they are looking for. Accordingly, they prioritize genuinely helpful content.

Content Velocity

Content velocity is the number of new pages that are published over a period of time. This is different from keyword research and content production in that this is more about creating a consistent flow of content. Search engines are heavily weighted in favour of fresh content, so in order to be able to rank higher in search engine result pages, you’ll need to publish new, high-quality content more often. Search engines have also caught on to the fact that brands that produce one-off content here and there generally don’t have an overarching content strategy. They may not have mapped out their customer journey, or they’re just not ready to create a comprehensive organic search strategy. With high content velocity, you’re able to send the right signals to search engines, and people, that you are invested in putting out more content, more often.

Try our $300 Validate Program to Test Out Content Velocity

Creating content on a regular cadence takes a lot of time, and resources. Good news for you is that you can quickly, and cost-effectively see the results of producing high-quality content on a daily basis through our Validate Program. We will produce 10 SEO-optimized articles over the course of 30 days for $300, showcasing to you how we build SEO momentum & tipping points. Are you curious to see how the Validate program works? Schedule a call with us. We take on 3 new companies in our Validate program every month, and are usually booked out a few months in advance, so reserve your spot today!

What Causes the Tipping Point to Occur?

As you start producing high-quality content more often, you send the right signals to search engines that you are a credible authority in your space. That being said, if your content is high-quality, you will see increased rankings, and search traffic from search engines. As you start to see more search traffic, search engines pay close attention to user behaviour, they assess factors such as:

• Click through rate

• Bounce rate

• Traffic from other sources (ie., social, email, etc)

• Page scroll depth

So if users engage with your content, your efforts with SEO start to compound. Higher rankings lead to increased organic traffic, which in turn attracts more backlinks, which leads to a further boost in your site’s authority. It’s all one self-fulfilling prophecy. Here’s an actual visualization of how SEO compounds over time, contrasted to paid traffic (pay to play).

Tipping Point as Related to Business & Life

The tipping point is an important concept that’s relatable to business, and life. As you grow your organic search program, you begin to create a mass around your program, especially as you dominate more search engine result pages. The mass plays an instrumental role in your ability to rank for newer keywords as well. We’re borrowing this concept from this HBR article, where your organic search program ‘mass’ allows your team to dominate new keywords with greater speed. Because you’ve already done the hard part, and proved to search engines that you are reliable, credible, and authoritative. So, as long as you keep heading in the right direction (content velocity), you’ll keep ranking for more new keywords, and increasing your orbit (mass) of organic search traffic.

Examples of Tipping Points

Here are some examples of tipping points for some of our clients:

1. B2B DevOps Solution goes from ~10 clicks per day, to 100+ clicks per day, within 3 months

2. Big Inflection Point for One of Our B2C Software Clients. Their organic search traffic doubled over a week

3. Building the Right Content Plan, and Going from 0 Clicks per Day to 60 Clicks per Day within 10 Days.

4. B2C Software Client scales from 7 clicks per Day to 180 Clicks per Day, and generates profitable search traffic.

How to Make the Most Out Of Your Organic Search Traffic?

Depending on your niche, organic search traffic is not a means to an end, meaning it may take some time to achieve the conversions, or business value that you are building towards. However, your newfound organic search traffic is a leverage point toward intelligent marketing activities. Think about it this way, if you’ve done the right keyword research, you’re now generating traffic that has relevance to your business, and varying degrees of intent. Now it’s your job to capture their interest and pull them down your marketing funnel. Here are 3 tactics that you can use to bring your audience along with you, and help them convert when they are ready:

Contextual Offers

Think about the frame of mind your audience has when they’re viewing your content. If someone is viewing your content, they know you, and like you, at this point, you just need to win their trust. You can do that by focusing on their needs and wants at that time. For example, if they are reading an article about ‘Increasing Employee Morale’, then they may be interested in some examples of how your solution has been used to increase employee morale, or they may even be interested in the top employee morale solutions. Here are some examples of contextual offers that you can provide to your visitors:

• Other content that they may be interested in

• Free trial offers

• Gated content related to the topic they are reading about

• Content that you’ve published on other platforms (ie., YouTube, Linkedin, etc)

Add Them To Your Email List

Email is under-utilized as a channel. It makes for a great way to power your customer acquisition efforts, as well as your customer retention efforts. If someone is viewing your content, your goal should be to get them to sign up for your email list. Why? Email is free. You don’t need to pay for ads to re-gain your audiences’ attention, it only takes some time to create the email. If you email your audience with high-quality content and good offers, you can drastically lower your cost of acquisition, especially if the bulk of your email list has been built through organic search.

Remarketing

In today’s attention-deficit world, it’s important to remarket your web visitors. Remarketing is significantly cheaper than advertising to a cold audience, and you may even have a higher conversion rate through these efforts. Remember, visitors to your website know you, and like you, they just need an extra little nudge to convert sometimes. So if you present them with the right offer in a remarketing ad, that may be the thing that helps them become a customer.

What to Do Next

We’ve covered a lot here, but you should see a clear understanding of how momentum is built in SEO, and what the tipping point signifies for your organic search program. Do you want to know another way to increase your search rankings? Increasing your output of content that your audience will resonate with. This may be a costly endeavour if you handle it internally, but the good news for you is that our team at Trailblazer will be happy to help you with this. You can cost-effectively gauge our performance as well, with our 30-day Validate program, where we help you Validate SEO for your business within 30 days, for only $300. Act fast – we only onboard 3 new companies each month!