What is Organic SEO? A Game-Changing Guide for Your Business
Key takeaways
- Organic SEO is an online marketing strategy designed to improve your website’s rankings in unpaid search results on search engines like Google or Bing.
- This strategy is important for improving brand visibility in online search engines, leading to more conversions and revenue.
- On-page, off-page, and technical SEO are key organic SEO strategies to improve your site’s rankings.
- Being on top of the SERPs requires an upkeep of your on-page, off-page, and technical SEO strategies.
If you’re not getting the website traffic that you need to boost your brand into industry stardom, you need to optimize for organic search.
To help you understand organic SEO and start integrating it into your marketing strategy, we’ve put together this guide. We’ll cover the basics of organic SEO, how it’s a game-changer for your business, and how you can get started:
- What is organic SEO?
- Why is organic SEO important?
- How does organic SEO work?
- How do I optimize for organic SEO?
- FAQs
Need help with organic search engine optimization? Call us at 888-601-5359 to learn more about our organic SEO services!
What is organic SEO?
Organic SEO is an online marketing strategy designed to improve your website’s rankings in unpaid search results on search engines like Google or Bing.
It involves tactics such as keyword research, link building, content creation, and optimizing page load time to appeal to gain higher placement in the search results.
Why is organic SEO important?
Organic SEO is important for improving brand visibility in online search engines, leading to more conversions and revenue.
About 69% of all clicks in Google go to the top three organic results. If you’re not ranking highly, you guessed it — your website won’t get any traffic, which means your site will struggle to bring sales and leads to your business.
Companies also need to pay attention to organic search engine optimization because it’s your prospects’ gateway to your website and to become your customer. When you rank for relevant searches, you’ll likely get new customers and grow your revenue.
We’ve worked with an ecommerce company to optimize its website to get more traffic and sales. Implementing organic SEO strategies (from updating product pages to improving the website’s user experience) increased its revenue by 95%.
Search is a valuable marketing channel that’s waiting to drive revenue for your business. You just have to start optimizing your site for organic SEO to start taking advantage of the benefits.
How does organic SEO work?
Organic SEO works by implementing the following strategies together to improve your website’s rankings and visibility in SERPs:
Let’s quickly discuss each strategy:
On-page SEO: Optimizing elements within your site
On-page SEO is the strategy of optimizing elements within your website’s pages, including:
- Content: Creating helpful, comprehensive content that answers your audience’s search intent
- Heading tags: Breaking up content with subheads to make it easy to read
- Page URL and meta tags: Using a descriptive URL, meta title, and meta description to inform searchers what to expect on your page
- Mobile friendliness: Creating a responsive website that makes it easy for your visitors to view and use your pages regardless of the device they’re using
- Internal linking: Helping crawlers and users explore your website and discover relevant content
Off-page SEO: Improving your brand’s authority and reputation
Off-page SEO strategies involve optimizations outside your webpages to improve your online reputation and website authority. It involves:
- Managing your brand mentions and citations
- Building relationships with publications within your niche
- Earning backlinks from reputable websites
- Monitoring your customers’ sentiments on social platforms and review sites
Technical SEO: Optimizing your site’s architecture
Technical SEO strategies focus on improving your site’s backend and server elements to help search engine bots crawl, index, and rank your pages. It involves the following:
- Improving your page speed
- Creating a robots.txt file
- Building an XML sitemap
- Keeping your website secure with HTTPs
- Fixing crawl errors
These techniques work together to appeal to Google’s ranking algorithm, which can help you rank higher in SERPs.
How to optimize for organic SEO
Optimizing for organic SEO is like growing and nurturing a plant — it’s an ongoing process to maintain your top position.
Being on top of the SERPs requires an upkeep of your on-page, off-page, and technical SEO strategies. Let’s get your website in search engines’ good graces with these organic SEO best practices:
Organic SEO best practices
1. Research your keyword strategy
Keyword research is extremely important in SEO in digital marketing — in fact, some would say it’s the basis of effective organic SEO strategies.
Start by entering keywords related to your products or services into a keyword research tool like KeywordsFX. With these tools, you can see variations of those keywords, their search volumes, competition, and cost-per-click value.
Here are effective keyword strategy tactics:
Balance short- and long-tail keywords
Ideally, you’ll choose keywords with high monthly search volumes and low competition — this is the secret sauce when it comes to finding effective keywords.
When you’re choosing keywords, you should consider targeting a variety of short-tail and long-tail keywords. Short-tail keywords are more general keywords like “ice cream cake.” Long-tail keywords are more specific keywords and phrases like “chocolate chip hand-dipped ice cream.”
As you can see, these keywords are very different and attract searchers with different intents.
If you run an ice cream parlor and write a page that targets the keyword “ice cream cake,” you’re going to have a really hard time ranking for that keyword in search results.
Why? Because thousands of other ice cream parlors are also trying to rank for that exact same keyword.
As you can see, the search volume is super high for the keyword, but so is the competition.
On the other hand, if you write a page that targets the long-tail keyword “chocolate chip hand-dipped ice cream,” you’ll have a much easier time ranking since not every ice cream parlor will create content about that product. The search volume is much lower, but so is the competition.
Consider the keywords’ difficulty scores
Once you’ve identified your keywords, find out their keyword or ranking difficulty.
Keyword difficulty tells you how competitive a keyword is and how hard it is to rank for it. Typically, keywords with higher search volume — or the more popular search terms — have higher difficulty scores.
Keyword research tools like Ahrefs can help you uncover difficulty scores and other keyword metrics.
Understand the search intent of the keywords
Aside from the keywords’ competition, you must also understand the search intent behind the terms and find out why people use those terms.
Search intent can be:
- Informational: A user is searching online to learn about a certain topic.
- Navigational: A searcher is looking for a specific brand, but they need help finding the product or service page.
- Transactional: A user is ready to buy. These searches have the most commercial intent, with people using “price” and “sale” in their keyword phrase.
- Commercial: A user is ready to buy, but they need more information to help them choose the right product.
2. Create helpful content that addresses your customer’s search intent
After you’ve chosen a list of keywords that will effectively target your audience, it’s time to start writing. Google ranks this content in search results, so like we mentioned before, it’s important that it’s informative and beneficial to readers to earn top organic rankings.
If you want online users and search engines to trust your brand and content, follow Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust) guidelines. Based on these guidelines, you must publish helpful content that showcases experience, expertise, and authority in your field — and not just recycled information found on every other website.
🎥 Watch: What Google E-E-A-T Means for Your Web Content
Publish case studies and portfolio that show your industry experience. Meanwhile, adding your relevant credentials and certifications on your site tells your site visitors that you’re an expert in your field.
Original research can boost your authority, while testimonials are social proof that fosters trust among your prospects.
Types of content you can publish
You can choose to publish a variety of content types to address your prospects’ search intent and showcase your expertise:
- Blogs
- Product or service pages
- Industry articles
- White papers
- Original research
- Case studies
- Videos
- Infographics
3. Optimize on-page elements
Creating helpful content is just one of the first steps to your on-page SEO. Strategically optimize other on-page elements of your site, including:
Headings
Use H1, H2, and H3 subheads to make your content easy to skim. It also gives crawlers context about your page, so they can better understand your page’s content.
Headings also create a clear hierarchy within your page. Both search engines and users can better understand your messages on your page.
Meta title, description tags, and URL
Write descriptive URLs, and meta title and description tags. Typically appearing in the SERPs, these elements tell users what your page is about and convince them to click your link.
Use your primary keywords in the URL, instead of random numbers or letters. Then, frontload your primary keywords in the meta title. That way, searchers can immediately spot them, and you don’t risk them getting cut off in the SERPs.
Pro tip: Keep your meta titles within the optimal length of 50 to 60 characters and meta descriptions within 150 to 160.
Image and video alt text
Optimize your images and videos by adding descriptive alt text to accompany them. Alt text makes your content accessible, which means people using screen readers can visualize what your image looks like.
Internal links
Guide your users throughout your site with internal links, so they can easily find what they’re looking for. An internal linking structure is also helpful for search engine bots — it leads bots to discover your site’s other pages, so they can crawl and index your pages.
4. Strengthen your site’s technical SEO foundation
Give your website a solid technical foundation. Doing so improves your user’s on-site experience and ensures search engine bots can crawl, index, and retrieve your content for users to see.
Here are the technical SEO elements you can optimize:
Page speed
Did you know that 50% of site visitors leave a page if they’re forced to wait longer than 3 seconds? When you optimize your page speed, you’re improving your site visitor’s experience on your site.
And because page speed is one of Google’s ranking factors, improving your site speed also increases your chances to rank for relevant keywords.
Here are tactics to optimize your page’s speed:
Use Google's PageSpeed Insights
Measure your current performance against Core Web Vitals benchmarks:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): under 2.5 seconds
- First Input Delay (FID): under 100 milliseconds
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): below 0.1
Compress or resize your images
Use online image compression and resizing tools to reduce your image file size. Tools like Kraken.io and Optimizilla can compress images to reduce their file size without sacrificing quality.
Optimize your code
Remove spaces and unnecessary characters from your code to improve your site speed. Code comments, formatting, and unused codes are other elements you can remove.
Robots.txt file
A robots.txt file tells search engine bots which parts of your website they can crawl.
Strategically configure this file so that search engines can locate pages that you want your customers to discover in the SERPs. You wouldn’t want searchers to find the thank-you page that user sees when they sign up for your newsletter.
Pro tip: Don’t use robots.txt to hide pages from search results. Instead, use noindex tags or Google Search Console removal tools.
XML sitemap
Create your XML sitemap, which is a file on your site that tells search engine crawlers which pages you want them to check out. Once you’ve created your sitemap, verify that it’s doing its job by submitting your XML sitemap into Google Search Console.
Check the Sitemaps report for any errors. You can also check the Coverage report to find out the number of URLs discovered.
Pro tip: Keep your sitemap under 50,000 URLs and 50MB. If you have a large website, create multiple sitemaps and consolidate them in a sitemap index file.
HTTPS
Keep your site secure by properly implementing HTTPS. HTTPS encrypts any data that a user submits to your website.
It improves your website security, which is why it is one of Google’s ranking factors. To ensure that yours is properly executed, you can test your SSL configuration using Qualys SSL Server Test.
5. Build your brand authority by earning quality backlinks
Backlinks are links from one website to another. Also known as incoming links, backlinks are a Google ranking factor that boosts your credibility and authority.
Fun fact: Google was formerly called BackRub, because it used to rank pages according to the number of backlinks they get.
Not every backlink is valuable, though. Quality backlinks come from reputable websites and legitimate review sites.
Reputable websites are trustworthy sites with high domain authority and a decent amount of legitimate traffic. These are the incoming links you want for your website.
You can get them from the following:
- Backlinks from industry publications
- Guest post links from relevant websites
- Recommended resources backlinks
- Citation backlinks (mentions of your business on online directories)
- Business profile backlinks
Pro tip: Do not buy links or get them from link farms. Doing so is a black-hat SEO practice and will do more harm than good to your reputation and ranking.
How to earn quality backlinks
Establish your brand authority by gaining backlinks from reputable websites. Here are tactics you can use:
Publish valuable content and interactive tools
Get referral traffic when you create original content and even tools, such as the following:
- Original research
- Comprehensive guides
- Downloadable templates
- Tools, calculators, and quizzes
- Infographics
Build professional relationships with the press through digital PR
Reach out to your journalist connections to pitch your original research or handy interactive tool. If their editorial teams find your content news- or feature-worthy, they’ll likely publish a story linking to your site.
You can also distribute press releases for newsworthy updates.
Reclaim unlinked brand mentions
This is perhaps one of the easiest ways to get backlinks.
Track your brand’s online mentions using media monitoring tools. Then reach out to any publication or website that mentions your business or products.
Thank them for their feature and suggest that they link back to your site or specific page, explaining the value it brings to their readers. In exchange for their favor, you can share their feature on your social media platforms.
Pro tip: Prioritize websites with high domain authority.
Forge partnerships
Build partnerships within your industry and beyond. For example, for ice cream businesses, there are associations in the country that they can join not only for backlinks, but also for networking and exposure.
Strategic partnerships are also key. In our example (the ice cream business), it can team up with a children’s museum to showcase ice cream’s origin and how it’s made. Because of the partnership, each brand will link to the other’s website.
Find a complementary business you share values with. Through your partnership, you’re boosting each other’s brand awareness, creating content together, and building backlinks naturally.
Use tools to monitor the backlink health of your site and competitor’s
Backlink checkers are tools that can monitor the incoming links you get and warn you about bad links, which you can disavow. They’re also handy for identifying backlink opportunities from your competitors.
Check out these backlink monitoring tools:
6. Monitor and refine your SEO strategy
SEO is not a one-and-done task. It’s an ongoing process of monitoring and measuring your results, so you can fine-tune your strategies and maximize your ROI.
Effective organic SEO involves the following:
Tracking the right metrics
Start your organic SEO effort with an audit of your site. You can use free tools like our SEO Checker to see your site’s baseline data. Then, use SEO tools to track the following metrics:
- Search visibility metrics (such as keyword rankings, SERP feature visibility in featured snippets, knowledge panels, and AI Overviews, and indexed pages count)
- User behavior metrics (such as organic traffic growth, and engagement and conversion from organic traffic)
- Technical SEO metrics (such as Core Web Vitals performance, mobile responsiveness, and indexation rate)
Analyzing your results
Use your site audit results as your performance baseline. Then, use SEO tools to help you analyze your data:
- Google and Bing tools (such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google PageSpeed Insights, and Bing Webmaster Tools)
- SEO monitoring tools (such as Ahrefs, Moz Pro, and Semrush)
- SEO audit platforms (such as Screaming Frog and SERP Racer)
- Heatmaps and user behavior tools (such as Hotjar)
Refining your strategies
Once you’ve analyzed your results, you can identify areas of your organic SEO strategy that need immediate optimization. Depending on your results, you may need to do any of the following:
- Updating content with the latest information or to improve its performance
- Optimizing your website’s backend
- Shifting your target keyword focus
Staying updated with competitive analysis and the latest algorithm changes
SEO is always evolving. Stay updated with the latest core updates or algorithm changes by following reliable SEO industry sources.
To stay competitive, track your competitors’ SEO performance, too, and close any gaps if necessary.
FAQs on organic SEO
How much does organic SEO cost?
Prices for organic SEO depend on several factors, from your strategy’s aggressiveness to your SEO agency’s pricing model. On average, companies will invest $500 - $7,500 per month.
How long does organic SEO take?
On average, it takes anywhere from six months to a year to see results from SEO. The timeline will vary based on many factors, including how much time you invest in SEO, how optimized your site was originally, and how effective your tactics are.
SEO is an ongoing process, so you can’t expect immediate results from your campaign. SEO requires more time and resources invested upfront, but it delivers results for a long, consistent period.
Should you do organic SEO yourself?
Many companies choose to do SEO in-house. However, adding the workload it takes to improve your site can be a challenge for some businesses. Some companies choose to start implementing techniques slowly and then shift to working with an agency to get their results moving.
If you aren’t sure whether you should do SEO yourself, consider the following:
- Your budget
- Your team
- Your timeline
- Your current website optimizations
- Any past SEO attempts
So, while you can do SEO yourself, it’s worth considering working with an agency if it fits your goals.
Implement an organic SEO strategy with the experts
Although you can do organic SEO and paid search on your own, it’s a huge undertaking. If you think you need help, we recommend partnering with an organic SEO company like WebFX.
We’ve been in the business for 29 years and delivered $91M in client revenue through SEO.
If you’d like to work with the best SEO company in the world, as per Clutch, contact us online, or give us a call at 888-601-5359 to learn more about our organic SEO services!