Organic Search Optimization: Being in the Right Place at the Right Time

Organic search optimization is the case for why businesses should not rely on one platform for brand awareness and leads. 

In the construction industry, staying visible online is crucial for attracting new clients and maintaining your competitive edge. Organic Search Optimization (OSO) is a growing approach to marketing that extends beyond traditional SEO (which is website based) by optimizing your brand’s presence across multiple platforms, including web, social media, reviews, and other online channels. It also safeguards your brand from missing out on valuable leads.

With AI tools like Google’s Search Generative Experience now shaping search results, it’s more important than ever to ensure your content is accessible and engaging wherever potential customers might find you. Embracing OSO ensures that your company maintains a strong presence wherever your potential clients may be, thereby driving better brand awareness, engagement and growth.

Why OSO is the Best Approach

Organic Search Optimization re-prioritizes your digital footprint. It is about capitalizing on being in the right place at the right time.

SEO— which focuses on the creation and frequent updates of website content— becomes less of an urgency. Instead, OSO seeks to meet your clientele in all of the places they already are rather than bringing them to a single hub (your website) for lead capture or decision making. Any place where your company can interact with a potential client becomes a possible point of meaningful transaction.

OSO is the strategy that defines blended marketing. It is an all-inclusive approach that encompasses as many possible avenues for achieving one’s goal. In construction marketing, this means using a variety of platforms and also going beyond marketing digitally. It includes traditional marketing such as cultivating word-of-mouth relationships, implementing billboards, trade conference attendance, and distributing printed materials, even in the age of digital domination.

This does not mean SEO is dead. As a matter of fact, there is still much ground to be covered by many companies in this area.  However, it does mean companies are going to have to adapt. And that adaptation comes in the form of blending strategies into a more well-rounded approach. Optimizing websites and blogs to grab Google’s attention is now, at best, only part of the strategy.

Is Traditional SEO Still Worth the Effort?

SEO is about attracting people to your website. It can come in two forms: on or off-site SEO.

On-Site SEO is the most commonly understood. It uses content relevance, keywords/phrases,  web page formatting, and technical infrastructure to ensure that Google understands your content and can direct people to it accordingly.

Off-Site SEO is a strategy that involves activities outside of your website to improve its ranking in search engine results (for example, backlinks). When combined with on-page SEO, off-page SEO can help your website meet its goals for traffic, conversions, and more. This builds your website’s reputation and establishes your company as an authority.

Website Point-of-Action

Both types of SEO see your website as the primary hub of activity. Whether you’re capturing a lead on a landing page or converting it into a sale on a service page, the point of optimizing your website is to get the potential client to a point-of-action on your website.

Doing this involves adhering to Google’s rules: using the right keywords, spacing content properly, ensuring quality navigation, etc. And as people will likely continue to use online search engines, search engine optimization will remain useful. 

But all of this assumes that the Google search engine is the dominant form of access to the internet and any queries someone might have. But what happens when our access to information is no longer organized around a single list curated by Google?

(Worth Noting:  Stay informed about the ongoing court case where Google was found to have violated antitrust laws in August 2024 by illegally maintaining a monopoly in internet search. The stakes are acutely high for Google, which became a $2 trillion internet juggernaut. The judge in the case could reshape the core of the company’s business or order it to abandon longtime practices that have helped to cement its dominance.)

Incorporating SEO with Broader OSO

Search Engine Optimization has been in people’s wheelhouse for a long time. Creating a positive website experience with relevant and curated key phrases to entice Google’s web crawlers is a pretty basic, if sometimes challenging, strategy.

And for years, digital marketers have written blogs providing and including key phrases to establish ‘authority’ on a subject, all in an effort to pique user interest and improve website traffic.

But Organic Search Optimization is a new strategy owing its origin, at least in part, to the advent of generative AI populating itself in Google’s search results. These AI generated results are now at the top of many searches pushing ‘normal’ results with links to websites like yours farther down the page. This new search results experience draws attention to the need for a broader approach to marketing for any business.

With traditional SEO, Google directed a user’s choice of options. The challenge was getting Google to direct the user where you, the service provider, want them to go. Now, Google is answering user questions directly with AI (we recommend a trust-but-verify approach when using AI answers).  Thereby, in many cases, diminishing the need for additional scrolling or ‘clicking’ to visit a website.  This means that many websites are now at risk of receiving less traffic. And that means less opportunities to make an impression on a visitor.

The Opportunity within the Search Generative Experience

The comprehensive nature of an all-inclusive marketing strategy means producing varied content. SEO as a traditional mode of marketing acts as a funnel, at the base of which is your website. OSO marketing acts more like a dragnet, capturing leads through widespread, organized action, on any platform that will generate them.

And while OSO isn’t an entirely new concept, it does remind us that marketing is (and always has been) a marathon, not a sprint. 

Google’s Search Generative Experience is only the latest in a long trend to make organic results more difficult to acquire. Google has been reducing the visibility and overall number of organic search results for some time, as well as adding in features that draw attention away from them.

While Google’s AI still has a long way to go before it dominates the internet, it is changing the way things are done. And in the change comes the opportunity to introduce new methods of capturing leads or nurturing relationships. At SBC, we see opportunity in the ‘crisis’ of the Search Generative Experience.

The Case for Avoiding Over-Reliance on a Single Platform

OSO also reduces overreliance on a single strategy. In the last few years, perhaps nothing has emphasized the risks of relying too much on a single strategy more than Google’s wavering on whether to upend a long-time marketing favorite: the cookie.

Internet cookies are small files of data that websites send to your browser when you visit them.  They are also known as advertising cookies or targeting cookies that track a user’s behavior on a website. This information is used in digital marketing to personalize a user’s experience and tailor content to their interests.

For years, Google has held the marketing world in suspense as to whether or not it will abandon cookie collection as a way of gathering private data. After years of waiting, feedback, and discussion, the internet titan has decided it will keep the tactic around in some form. 

“[Google] we are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice. Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time. We’re discussing this new path with regulators, and will engage with the industry as we roll this out.” 

Don’t Gamble

As evidenced by years of flip-flop declarations of intention, there is no guarantee that Google will hold fast to this most recent ideology.  Other titan’s in the industry, such as Adam Mosseri (the head of Instagram) or Mark Zuckerberg (Chairman and CEO of Meta), may decide to change algorithms or tried-and-true practices the way Elon Musk did when he purchased Twitter.  The point is that over-reliance on a single strategy weakens a marketing plan. Such over-dependence runs the risk of being overturned by a market shift or a software update. By contrast, organic search optimization diversifies one’s tactical options. 

Advantages of OSO

More Tactics

With traditional SEO, only one goal was in mind: the successful funnel of potential clients to a website or webpage for conversion.

OSO allows for the re-allocation of marketing resources to include underutilized platforms. It justifies a commitment to effective but often understated marketing opportunities.  Consider, for instance, conference attendance where networking (especially in construction) is key, as well as telling the stories that unfold at those conferences where company culture is often expressed in full. 

Deeper Engagement

Off-site SEO leverages all available platforms to attract potential clients to your website. But OSO encourages deeper, more meaningful engagement within the setting where the interaction takes place.

Meaningful engagement requires more time and effort but creates conditions for unexpected growth. A “like” or “follow” may be just that – but with the right cultivation, it can also be the beginning of a lasting partnership, a recurring client, or a valuable association.

Put another way, with the ‘usual’ way of doing things, the various platforms from which a company might broadcast are used more like sign posts leading back to a website instead of leveraged as spaces of interaction. With OSO, instead of only pointing back to your website, all platforms become meaningful by directly interfacing with the user where they are.

Greater Expression

OSO is an opportunity to express your company’s culture and value in its full uniqueness. SEO often bounds one’s strategy with keywords/phrases, concepts, and formulations dictated by an algorithm. And while OSO isn’t going to completely ‘free’ companies from this algorithm, embracing content from diverse sources means that those limitations will be less inhibiting.

With traditional SEO as less of a burden now, going ‘off script’ to find the right words to say in copy, caption, or keyphrase is a lower priority. More energy can be dedicated to building one’s brand, tailoring verbiage, and cultivating one’s online persona.

More Than Numbers

OSO is less about the vanity metrics of website traffic, UTM tracking, and social media followers. It takes brand marketing to the next level, focusing on client interaction and storytelling.

By spreading one’s focus beyond mere numbers, relationships and community can be cultivated in ways that might’ve been ignored before. 

In construction, nurturing return clientele is an important part of the industry’s income. It is also an affordable one. Home remodelers, for example, will gain a great deal from customer retention. This is not only in the form of renewed income, but in the form of positive referrals.

OSO Supports the Decision-Making Journey of a New Client 

Today’s decision-making journey includes a twisting path with several opportunities along the way for businesses to make an impression (not unlike the LIFE board game).  Long gone are the days of opening the Yellow Pages or relying on a website alone to make a selection.  Today, consumers are able to conduct active and passive research that ultimately builds to an informed decision backed by data; statistical, empirical and theoretical.  Along their journey, your future clients are looking to learn about your company’s:

• Expertise
• Experience
• Services
• Support
• Cost 
• Reputation 

Future clients may also want to know answers to questions such as: 

• What are your work hours? 
• Do you provide support in different languages? 
• What strategies do you plan to use for the work? 
• Do you have partners / subcontractors? 
• Do you offer additional services beyond your core services?

OSO promotes your company along the journey while potential clients are slowly forming opinions. They are also (sub)consciously making decisions based on what they see (or don’t see). This includes on social media, review sites, billboards, one-on-one interactions, word of mouth, online forums, websites, printed materials, trade publications and more.  Leveraging every opportunity to fill-in these holes in their knowledge can lead your potential client one step closer to choosing you.

Get Started Today: Receive Your Company’s Digital Punch List

After this article, you may be wondering how well your construction company is performing online. If you’d like an audit in the form of a digital punch list, with absolutely no obligation, get started here.