Why Organic SEO Takes Guts, but It’s Effective
According to BrightEdge, 53% of all trackable website traffic comes from organic search. Additionally, Smart Insights reported that organic results get 94% of the clicks compared to paid results.
So, it’s no wonder why you may be interested in learning more about organic search engine optimization (SEO) and implementing it for your website.
So, let’s start our Organic SEO journey and discover what it is, why it’s essential, what some strategies are, and what benefits it provides.
What Is Organic SEO?
Organic SEO is the process of optimizing a website so it ranks higher in search engine results without using artificial methods.
The goal of Organic SEO is not just to get traffic to your site, but to convert that traffic into customers as well. Your goal is to create engaging content that inspires your audience to take action. Organic SEO includes link-building, keyword research, and other techniques that make it possible for your site to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Organic SEO is not always easy. It takes time and effort to grow an organic online presence. However, it can be done with diligent work and patience, which I’ll go into more detail about later on in this blog post.
Why Is Organic SEO Important?
Despite its effectiveness, organic SEO is often overlooked for being less flashy and not providing instant results like pay-per-click (PPC) ads and search engine marketing (SEM).
However, the importance of organic SEO is because of its long-term benefits.
While it takes a while to see the benefits, it is worth the wait.
There are two major ways how organic SEO affects your website and online presence:
- Increases traffic to your website for relevant search terms
- Improves your ranking on SERPs
By using organic SEO, your business can reach new customers searching for the products or services you offer but aren’t aware of your business’s exact name.
It also helps improve your website’s rankings for specific keywords and phrases, resulting in more visitors from SERPs and more sales revenue in general.
How Organic SEO Works & Strategies
Organic SEO works by implementing strategies and techniques which you can use to increase the search engine ranking of your website without paying for any ads.
These strategies involve making your website more visible on the internet and improving its ranking on SERPs.
Let’s go over a few critical ways you can implement Organic SEO for your online presence.
Conduct Keyword Research (Continuously)
Keyword research is an essential component of any SEO strategy because it helps you identify what keywords people are searching for and what keywords would be best to target with content.
Good SEO keyword research should provide insight into the searcher’s intent, allowing you to tailor your content strategy to their needs.
You can also use keyword research as a tool for analyzing what you should write about on your website.
Keyword research provides insight into whether you are successfully targeting your desired audience and allows you to make adjustments accordingly.
A great, free tool to help with basic keyword research is a Chrome and Firefox extension called Keywords Everywhere. Another free option is WordStream. For paid tools, I recommend Semrush, an all-in-one SEO tool.
There are two types of keywords you should focus on; they are short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords.
Short-Tail Keywords vs. Long-Tail Keywords
A short-tail keyword is a term that has high search volume but is highly competitive.
A long-tail keyword, on the other hand, has lower search volume and often has less competition.
A #ShorttailKeyword is a term that has high search volume but is highly competitive. A #LongtailKeyword has lower search volume and often has less competition. #KeywordResearch #SEO #SEOStrategy #OrganicSEOClick to PostThus, short-tail keywords are tougher to rank for and more challenging overall because they are more competitive.
It’s hard for you to beat your competitors when their keywords are precisely matched with yours.
The solution, then, lies in long-tail keywords which have less competition.
An example short-tail keyword would be “restaurants” or “restaurant delivery.” Unfortunately, these keywords would be tough to rank highly for because the competition is fierce.
However, keywords like “warm and cozy restaurants” or “group-friendly restaurants” are long-tail keywords, and while they have less search volume, it would be easier for your website to rank higher when someone searches for those keywords.
Technical SEO & Internal Linking
Technical SEO refers to all the steps taken outside of content creation that help with search engine optimization; things like site architecture (including URL structure), page load time, redirects, canonical URLs, or pagination (i.e., how pages are grouped), site speed, etc.
One aspect of technical SEO is internal linking, which connects pages on your website together by linking to them from other pages on your website.
Internal linking is a crucial component of any SEO strategy. It helps improve the user experience by directing specific content to the visitor, and it helps search engines like Google better understand your site’s content.
The best practice for internal linking is to use anchor text that describes a specific keyword or topic on a page. This will help your site rank higher in SERPs because it tells Google what the page is about.
For example, if you have an article about dog training and you want to link back to the article from another related article, you should use anchor text like “dog training” or “training dogs.”
As you post new content on your website, it’s essential to go through your site and find places to place references to the new content.
If you’re working with WordPress, I highly recommend the plugins Rank Math and LinkWhisper to help you with your internal linking.
Optimize Your Page Load Time For SEO
Page load time impacts user experience and SEO as it affects the indexing of the pages in search engine results pages and, consequently, their ranking.
For example, Google penalizes slow-loading websites by lowering their page rank, so it is imperative to make sure your website doesn’t have a slow loading time to maintain a prominent position.
You can use Google’s free tool called PageSpeed Insights to test your website’s speed. Another tool I use is GTMetrix, as they offer ongoing monitoring of your site for free. You can also check WebPageTest for further website analysis.
If you’re looking to see get your PageSpeed Insights score in bulk, I recommend Experte’s PageSpeed Insights Crawling tool which is free to use!
Several Tips To Improve Page Speed
Compress Your Images & Utilize The Latest Formats
While you want your images to look sharp on all devices, it’s important to keep the file size down. You can accomplish this in a variety of ways, depending on your website’s platform.
There are two main types of compression: lossless and lossy. Lossless compression reduces the file size without altering the original data, meaning that it can be uncompressed with no quality loss. On the other hand, Lossy compression reduces some quality, but most importantly, it reduces the size of the file.
Regarding image file format, use new image formats such as WebP and AVIF.
WebP is an image format similar to JPEG, but it uses a more efficient compression algorithm.
WebP images are up to 40% smaller compared with the same JPEG images. WebP also supports lossless conversion and animation, as well as transparency.
AVIF is a relatively new image format, but it has a lot of potential. An AVIF image offers significant file size reduction compared with JPEG, PNG, and WebP and is currently supported by Google Chrome, Firefox, and Android.
For WordPress, I recently switched from using ShortPixel to having my images served via Bunny.net CDN, which has image optimization support. I’ve also tried out Optimole, but preferred Bunny.net overall. To the best of my knowledge, ShortPixel is one of the few WordPress plugins that can convert image uploads to WebP & AVIF.
If you use WordPress or not, another popular solution is ImageKit.io.
Minimize & Compress CSS and JavaScript Files
According to some Google tests, minification can reduce your page size with up to 63% compression savings. In addition, there are several advantages of delivering minified CSS & JavaScript files to your users. The most important one is faster loading times, which saves bandwidth and requires lower resources.
For compression, a typical method uses GZIP, which is usually handled by your hosting provider.
Another solution is to use a content delivery network (known as a CDN), such as KeyCDN, StackPath, CloudFlare. These CDNs do file minification and compression.
If you’re using WordPress, we highly recommend the plugin WP Rocket to speed up your website, as it can minify your files and optimize the delivery of them. If you want to get slightly more advanced, you can also implement Autoptimize with RapidLoad, which removes unused CSS and decreases page load times.
Implement Browser Caching
Browser Caching is when your browser saves a copy of web pages and assets so they won’t have to be downloaded each time you visit the site.
The major benefit of browser caching is that it has reduced latency for pages. It also reduces bandwidth usage and loading times.
Create Visual Content
Visual content has become an increasingly important part of SEO because of its high engagement rates on social media platforms.
Since visual content can be shared across many different platforms, you can reach a broad audience.
It also increases the quality of the user experience and increases customer engagement with your business.
There are many ways you can incorporate visual content into your digital marketing campaign, including images, infographics, and videos that accompany written articles.
When you’ve got an eye-catching design or unique concept, people will probably share it on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
To create visual content, you can use services like Canva, Adobe Creative Express, and, for videos, Clipchamp.
Build Backlinks To Your Website
Every website owner must know that it is not enough to create good content: you also need to distribute & share it to build backlinks.
Backlinks are the links from another website to your website.
Many different factors determine what will help you build backlinks.
First of all, you should know that backlinks cannot be bought, so you’ll have to work hard to earn them organically.
Here are a few ways you can start building your backlinks:
- Promote other relevant sites on social media & engage with both customers and other businesses
- Email influencers to see if there’s possible partnership.
- Share articles on social media and ask people to like and share it.
- Become active in forums and online communities where people discuss topics relevant to your website. Don’t spam.
While building backlinks to your website is probably the most challenging step in organic SEO, it’s the best, long-term strategy as it helps solidify your website’s “authority” with search engines like Google.
When Google sees sites linking to your content, especially if the other website has a higher page rank than yours, Google will increase your website’s authority score.
Check out Moz’s “Beginner’s Guide to Link Building” to learn more.
Integrate Your Local SEO Strategy
You can do this by creating a Google Business Profile. It is a free service that allows you to publish the details of your business online through their local profile listings. You can include information such as your business address, phone number, hours of operation, etc.
With a profile, you can include a link to your website and post new updates to your profile. So, whenever you create new content, have an online event, etc., you can create a post and link it to your website. Posting updates will also help with your organic SEO efforts; however, the updates only show up in search results for seven days.
If you’re interested in reading more about Google Business Profiles, read my article, “4 Benefits of Having a Google Business Profile.” Also, if you don’t have a profile set up for your business already, check out my Google Business Profile Management Service and I’ll help you get started!
What Are The Benefits of Organic SEO?
As you can see, implementing organic SEO can be time-consuming and, at times, challenging.
Even if you have an effective PPC campaign, know that it lasts only as long as your campaign: once you stop paying, you’ll lose visibility and ranking.
Organic Search Increases Your Visibility
The bottom line is that organic SEO is the best way to increase visibility for your website.
Getting a higher rank depends on relevance, so your content should be optimized to use keywords and phrases popular in a search engine’s algorithm for your niche.
Organic SEO is not only one of the most reliable ways to increase visibility on search engines, but it also provides an instant boost in customer conversion rates.
Leads generated organically have a conversion rate of 14.6%, far better than leads obtained through outbound activities, which have a conversion rate of 1.7% and costs more.
Organic Search Helps Build Your Online Authority
Building your online authority can be achieved through a successful organic SEO strategy.
Authority is the concept of a business being a thought leader or subject matter expert in their industry and having a significant digital presence.
Your “authority” has two main components:
- Domain Authority: Domain Authority is a metric that has been developed for SEO purposes. It is a numerical representation of how powerful and authoritative a website is, and it ranges from 1 to 100.
It’s important to know that domain authority doesn’t measure popularity or trustworthiness. It measures the power and the amount of trust that Google places in the website. The higher the domain authority, the more likely it will rank well in SERPs.
- Page Authority: Google evaluates page authority and assigns a ranking to each page based on a calculation of how relevant it is to the keywords that are entered in the search bar.
When you write content for your website, it’s important to focus on increasing your site’s page authority. It’s not just about writing a piece of content that has good SEO; it’s also about using strategies so that Google deems your site as being credible and authoritative.
Organic SEO can help you build authority through various methods mentioned in the strategies section, but here’s a quick overview:
- Build links from other domains that have higher domain authority.
- Build links that are diverse in terms of type, location, and social media reach.
- Creat original, quality blog posts & pieces of content that are easy for visitors to share.
Organic Search Brings In Highly Qualified Leads
People trust organic search results; many even bypass paid search results; this is why 65.6% of desktop clicks were organic during September 2018.
High-quality traffic comes from organic search engines.
When customers perform a search, they are searching for results that satisfy their needs.
If you create quality content with keywords that embody your ideal customer, you can reach your targeted audience.
In determining search intent, SEO can drive both highly desirable traffic and organic sales.
Earlier, I wrote about short-tail and long-tail keywords; well, there are also four main types of intentional keywords people use when searching.
They can assist you in increasing customer traffic and predicting the kind of customer your content is attracting.
- Informational Keywords are used when searchers are on the hunt for information. The aim is to find solutions to their problems, answers to their questions, and insight into a particular topic.
- Navigational Keywords are used when someone is looking for a particular website. For example, if they type in your site, product, or business, that’s a navigational search.
- Transactional Keywords are used when someone is ready to convert. Conversion doesn’t necessarily mean buying something. For example, it can entail creating an account, downloading an ebook, scheduling a free consultation, etc.
- Commercial Keywords indicate purchase intent. Someone using this type of keyword is likely ready to buy.
By leveraging this information, you can choose keywords that are appealing to your intended audience. You can learn about the needs of your customer thanks to SEO.
You don’t have to advertise your product or service to a random group of people hoping someone will purchase it.
Organic conversion rates are higher for transactional keywords, and organic sales are higher for commercial keywords.
So what kind of online visitors do you hope to attract?
Organic traffic, unlike other channels, enables you to select your customer through SEO.
Remember, before performing any SEO or marketing effort for your website, it’s essential to have web analytics implemented. You can then use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to analyze your traffic, gain insights into your visitor’s demographics, etc.
Conclusions of Successful Organic SEO
Traffic is the lifeblood of any website. But, unfortunately, getting these highly sought eyes on your website is not always easy.
Fortunately, you have several options to increase traffic, each with its benefits.
You can either use paid channels or organic search.
While search engine marketing certainly has merit as it can bring traffic quickly, it’s only good for so long and doesn’t carry long-term relationships with visitors.
However, by generating original, quality content consistently and generating traffic organically, you can develop a relationship with your visitors and continuously tailor content towards them.
In summary, organic SEO involves numerous strategies and methods. Still, it ultimately is about optimizing your website, creating content consistently, distributing your content, and building backlinks so that your content gets discovered and ranked higher than your competitors.
Organic SEO takes work, but it’s the ultimate long-term strategy for your website’s success.
If you would like help implementing organic SEO, or SEO in general, contact me today to learn how I can help!
Thanks for reading,
AJ
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Organic SEO?
Organic SEO is a strategy that focuses on improving the site’s relevance and authority to rank better in search engines. The most common, and often most effective, way to improve organic SEO is by using keywords.
Why Is Organic SEO Important?
By using organic SEO, your business can reach new customers searching for the products or services you offer but aren’t aware of your business’s exact name.
What Is A Short-Tail Keyword?
A short-tail keyword is a term that has high search volume but is highly competitive.
What Is A Long-Tail Keyword?
A long-tail keyword has lower search volume and often has less competition.