Natural Search Engine Optimisation: A Comprehensive Guide

Natural search engine optimisation (SEO) is a crucial aspect of online marketing that can't be ignored. By understanding how search engines work, you can optimise your website to rank higher in search results.

According to a study, 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results, making it essential to get your website on the first page.

To start with, let's break down what search engines like Google look for when crawling and indexing websites. They consider factors such as relevance, authority, and user experience.

Relevance is key, as it determines how well your website matches the search query. For example, if you're selling shoes, your website should contain keywords like "shoes" and "footwear".

Google's algorithm also looks at authority, which is determined by the quality and quantity of backlinks to your website.

Additional reading: Free Add Website to Search Engines

Keyword research is usually the first step of any legit SEO strategy. Start by creating a list of keywords that your target customers search for, and you can find these by typing a keyword into Google’s search field and looking at the list of suggestions it provides.

A unique perspective: Google Search Console Keyword Research

These suggestions usually make great keywords for SEO because they come straight from Google, and people are actually searching for them. Plus, longer keywords, known as "long tail keywords", tend to be less competitive than "short tail" terms.

Google Suggest is a great tool for finding these keywords. You can type a few different keywords into Google until you have a list of about 10 keywords. If you want to check out the search volume and competition levels for those terms, you can use a keyword tool like Semrush or Ubersuggest.

To get started, you'll need to conduct some keyword research. A powerful tool like Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool can help you conduct this research process. Simply open the tool, enter your seed keyword (a broad keyword that’s related to your business), and hit "Search."

The tool will then show thousands of keyword ideas within seconds, along with metrics for each suggestion like search volume and keyword difficulty. If your website is new, it's smart to focus on keywords that have lower keyword difficulty scores.

Here are the three main components of organic SEO, which are all connected to keyword research:

By understanding these components and conducting keyword research, you can improve your website's ranking in search results and attract more organic traffic.

Google's algorithm is a complex system that constantly evolves to improve search results. It's essential to understand how it works to optimize your website for natural search engine optimization.

Algorithm updates like Panda (2011) targeted low-quality content and keyword stuffing, while Penguin (2011) focused on link spam and manipulative link-building tactics. These updates highlight the importance of creating high-quality, original content and earning natural, high-quality backlinks.

The algorithm has become more sophisticated over time, with updates like Hummingbird (2013) improving search results for long-tail keywords and natural language queries. RankBrain (2015) introduced machine learning to process complex queries, and BERT (2018) enhanced Google's understanding of natural language and context.

Here are some of the key algorithm updates and their impact:

Google's algorithm is constantly evolving to improve the quality and relevance of search results. It's like a never-ending puzzle, with new pieces being added all the time.

Algorithm updates have a significant impact on website rankings and traffic. For example, the Panda update in 2011 targeted low-quality content and keyword stuffing, causing websites with thin or duplicate content to see a significant drop in rankings.

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These updates can be a game-changer for SEO practitioners, forcing them to focus on creating high-quality, original content. The Hummingbird update in 2013 improved search results for long-tail keywords and natural language queries, allowing Google to understand the context and intent behind queries better.

Here are some of the most notable algorithm updates and their impact:

Crawling is a fundamental part of how search engines discover new pages. They follow each link they find to see where it leads, much like a spider traversing a web.

This method is called a spider, continuing the spider's web metaphor. It's a crucial part of how search engines like Google discover new content.

While this method is effective, there are other ways to help search engines discover your pages. XML sitemaps are a key one, providing a list of URLs that you want search engines to crawl.

By including a sitemap and making sure each URL is discoverable through your linking structure, you can help ensure that search engines receive your content correctly from your server.

On-page optimization is a crucial aspect of natural search engine optimization. It involves optimizing your website's content to make it more search engine friendly and user-friendly.

To start, you need to conduct keyword research to understand what your target audience is searching for. This will help you create content that is relevant and useful to your audience.

A well-structured website architecture is also essential for on-page optimization. This includes creating an organized structure that organizes your pages into categories and pointing internal links to high-priority pages.

Here are some key elements to focus on for on-page optimization:

By focusing on these key elements, you can improve your website's on-page optimization and increase your chances of ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Remember, on-page optimization is an ongoing process that requires regular maintenance and updates. By staying on top of your website's optimization, you can improve your search engine rankings and drive more traffic to your website.

Curious to learn more? Check out: Difference between Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

Off-Page Optimization is all about getting other websites to link to yours, which acts as a vote of confidence in the eyes of search engines. This is where off-page SEO comes in, and it's mainly about building backlinks.

You can build links by earning them from high-quality third-party sites via the merit of your content, or by proactively building links and citations from high-quality third-party sites via outreach to those publications. You can also engage in online promotion, including social media marketing, being featured as a guest on third-party blogs, podcasts, and vlogs.

Here are some ways to get started with link building:

* Broken link building: Find non-working links on websites within your niche and request linkers to link to your site instead.Guest posting: Write high-quality content for other websites in your niche, including a link back to your own site.Create linkable assets: Produce content that's specifically designed to get links, such as industry studies, myth-busting articles, or visual guides.Focus on high-quality backlinks: Aim for links from trusted, authoritative sites that can pass more authority to your site.Identify unlinked brand mentions: Find mentions of your brand name without a link, and ask the website owner to update their copy with a link.

See what others are reading: Back Link Building

My favorite tool for SEO competitor analysis is Semrush. Their tool makes the process super easy and can save you a lot of time.

Competitor analysis is a crucial step in off-page optimization, and it's essential to identify your competitors to understand their strengths and weaknesses.

To identify your competitors, you need to know who's already ranking for your target keywords. This will help you create a solid strategy to outrank them.

Semrush can help you find your competitors and analyze their backlinks, keywords, and traffic. This information will give you a clear picture of their online presence.

Knowing your competitors' strengths and weaknesses will help you create a unique value proposition and differentiate yourself from the competition.

See what others are reading: How to Search Keywords Locally in Semrush

Building relevant links is a crucial part of off-page optimization. To get links from sites related to yours, aim to build links from relevant websites, as links from sites in other, unrelated industries can look unnatural.

Links from sites related to yours are likely to pass more SEO value than links from sites in other, unrelated industries. For example, if you have a baking site, links from video game blogs would be considered unrelated.

You can check your current backlink profile with a tool like Semrush's Backlink Analytics. This tool will help you gauge the authority of any website and identify opportunities for link building.

To get links from relevant websites, focus on creating linkable assets, such as free tools, in-depth guides, and interesting datasets. These types of content are naturally attractive to users and can earn you backlinks.

Here are some examples of linkable assets:

The key is to create content that adds value to users and encourages them to link back to your site. For example, a mortgage calculator like the one from Bankrate can earn over 350,000 backlinks from 1900 unique domains.

By focusing on building relevant links, you can improve your website's authority and increase your chances of ranking higher in search engine results.

Google uses a mobile-first indexing approach, which means the mobile version of your website is the main version Google uses for ranking.

More than 60% of all traffic comes from mobile devices, making mobile optimization a top priority.

If you've verified your site in Google Search Console, you can see whether or not your site has any mobile usability issues in the Core Web Vitals report.

You want to pass Google's Core Web Vitals to provide a great user experience for desktop and mobile users.

To improve your mobile-friendliness, use a responsive design to ensure everything appears and functions properly on different screen sizes.

Avoid intrusive popups and ads, which can provide a poor experience, especially on mobile.

Use appropriate font sizes for mobile devices to boost readability.

Make all of your buttons and menus easy to tap, not just click.

Here are some quick ways to improve your mobile-friendliness:

Technical optimization is a crucial aspect of natural search engine optimization. It ensures that search engines can easily find, crawl, and index all the pages on your website.

Discover more: Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing

To achieve this, technical SEO includes management of various elements such as analytics setup, site crawling, and indexing status. It also involves checking the robots.txt status, canonicalization, and internal link architecture design and management.

A slow-loading website can hurt your SEO, as Google has used page speed as a ranking factor on mobile and desktop since 2018. You can check your website speed with Google's PageSpeed Insights tool, which gives your page a 0-100 performance rating and provides suggestions to improve your site's loading speed.

To get a feel for how well your website performs in terms of technical SEO, a full technical audit can help. You can use Semrush's Site Audit tool, which is free and can scan your website and generate a comprehensive report. The tool will prompt you to complete the setup process, and once you do, it will initiate the audit and provide a "Site Health" score, which gives you a quick overview of your website's overall technical SEO performance.

Consider reading: On Page Seo Content

Google Console & Analytics is a powerful toolset that helps you monitor and maintain your website's presence in Google search results. You can access it for free.

Google Search Console provides insights into search traffic, impressions, clicks, and alerts for technical issues and security threats. It's a must-have for identifying and fixing issues affecting your website's performance in search results.

Google Analytics, another free tool, helps you track and analyze website traffic, behavior, and conversion rates. It provides insights into user demographics, behavior, conversion rates, and data on website performance and technical issues.

With Google Analytics, you can better understand how users interact with your website and make data-driven decisions to improve your SEO strategy. This is especially important for determining what success looks like and measuring it.

Here are the key features of Google Console and Analytics:

Using these tools, you can identify and fix issues affecting your website's performance in search results, track and analyze website traffic, and make data-driven decisions to improve your SEO strategy.

Managing technical aspects of your website is crucial for organic SEO. Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you monitor and maintain your website's presence in Google search results, providing insights into search traffic, impressions, clicks, and alerts for technical issues and security threats.

Google Analytics is another free tool that helps you track and analyze website traffic, behavior, and conversion rates, providing insights into user demographics, behavior, conversion rates, and data on website performance and technical issues.

A slow-loading website isn't just annoying for users, it can hurt your SEO too. Google has used page speed as a ranking factor on mobile and desktop since 2018. You can check your website speed with Google's PageSpeed Insights tool, which gives your page a 0-100 performance rating and a laundry list of things you can do to speed things up.

To get a feel for how well your website performs in terms of technical SEO, a full technical audit can help. Semrush's Site Audit tool is free and can prompt you to complete the setup process, generating a comprehensive report that includes a "Site Health" score and a list of identified issues with advice on how to fix them.

Determining how your content renders for search engine crawlers is critical. If they see a broken page structure or just a blank page, your rankings will suffer accordingly. With the Core Web Vitals becoming part of the ranking algorithm, you need to make sure your pages render quickly and smoothly, with no extra complications from JavaScript.

Setting up HTTPS is also important, as Google gives a slight edge in the search results for websites that are secure with HTTPS. Ideally, you'll set up HTTPS when you first launch your website, and make sure to redirect all your pages to the correct URL to avoid any issues.

Moz offers a suite of free tools that can improve your SEO strategy and efforts. These tools are essential for website owners and SEO practitioners aiming to improve their search engine rankings and drive more organic search traffic.

You can use Keyword Explorer to discover and prioritize the best keywords to target for your SEO campaigns. It provides insights into keyword search volume, difficulty, and organic CTR, enabling you to optimize your content for relevant search terms.

Suggestion: Keyword Ranking Tool Google

To analyze your backlink profile and gain insights into your domain authority, use Link Explorer. It helps you identify opportunities for high-quality backlinks and understand your site's link-building progress.

Moz Bar is a free browser extension that provides instant SEO metrics for any web page. It allows you to analyze page SEO, domain authority, and link metrics, all while browsing the web.

Here are some of the key tools and resources provided by Moz:

Tracking your progress is a crucial part of SEO, and there's a fantastic tool to help you do just that. Google Search Console is a free tool that gives you valuable insights into how your website is performing in Google Search.

With Google Search Console, you can see how many people are clicking on your site from search results, which is known as clicks. Impressions show how often your site appears in search results, and average position reveals what position your site is holding in search results.

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Google Search Console provides a wealth of information, including data on queries, which are the search terms that show your site. You can also see your click-through rate (CTR), which is the percentage of people who click through to your site for those queries.

Here's a breakdown of the key metrics you can track with Google Search Console:

Overall, you want to see your clicks increase over time, which suggests that your SEO strategies are working and generating more traffic.

Moz offers a suite of free tools that can improve your SEO strategy and efforts.

The Keyword Explorer tool helps you discover and prioritize the best keywords to target for your SEO campaigns, providing insights into keyword search volume, difficulty, and organic CTR.

Link Explorer allows you to analyze your backlink profile and gain insights into your domain authority, identifying opportunities for high-quality backlinks and understanding your site's link-building progress.

For more insights, see: Google Search Console Keyword Ranking

The Moz Bar is a free browser extension that provides instant SEO metrics for any web page, allowing you to analyze page SEO, domain authority, and link metrics while browsing the web.

Moz's competitive research tools enable you to analyze your competitors' SEO strategies, uncover their top-ranking keywords, and identify areas where you can gain a competitive edge.

Here are some of the key features of Moz's free tools:

By leveraging Moz's free tools, you can conduct effective keyword research, analyze backlinks, and gain insights into your competitors' strategies, all of which are crucial for a successful SEO strategy.

To create a solid SEO strategy, you need to start with a clear understanding of your goals. This typically involves defining what you want your users to do on your website if the point of sale is not the website.

Determining your goals is the first step in planning your SEO work. This might be to get customer signups or collect leads, but it's essential to define exactly what you want your users to do on the website.

A good way to approach this is to use a framework like the one used at Portent, which involves determining goals, deciding on KPIs, performing keyword research, auditing the website, and organizing improvements into projects.

Here's a breakdown of the key steps to create an SEO strategy and plan:

If you have the time and expertise, doing-it-yourself SEO (DIY SEO) is a viable option.

Having worked with diverse websites and industries, professionals bring a depth of knowledge and experience.

Hiring a professional SEO expert or agency is your best choice if you don't have the time or expertise to execute organic SEO strategies yourself.

A professional SEO expert or agency is your reliable partner who can work with you to achieve your SEO goals and grow your online presence.

A goal-first strategy is key to creating an effective SEO plan. You need to define what you want to achieve with your website, whether it's getting customer signups, collecting leads, or something else entirely.

To determine your goals, consider what actions you want your users to take on your website. This might not always be the case, so it's essential to define your goals clearly.

Decide on KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure success. YoY (year-over-year) gains or numerical targets are common, and these will be used in reporting later.

Perform keyword research to find sets of keywords that are opportunities for growth and used by people likely to complete website goals. Map these keywords to target landing pages.

Here's a breakdown of the steps to create a goal-first SEO strategy:

1. Determine goals

2. Decide on KPIs

3. Perform keyword research

4. Audit the website

5. Organize improvements into projects

6. Prioritize projects

7. Divide the project into tasks

8. Schedule tasks

9. Document the quarterly plan

10. Do monthly and quarterly reporting

This framework can be adapted to fit your organization's project management scheme, and it's a great starting point for creating an SEO plan that drives real results.

SEO is the practice of growing a website's traffic from search engines' unpaid search results. This type of traffic is earned, not paid for.

The main goal of SEO is to have your webpages appear higher in the unpaid search results for terms related to your business. For example, a "lending company" would want its website to rank high for searches like "small business loans" and "personal loans."

There are three main areas of SEO: on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO. On-page SEO consists of optimizing specific elements of a website page so that its contents are relevant and clear. Technical SEO involves managing the technical backend of your website so that search engines can effectively crawl, index, and understand it. Off-page SEO is about earning links, citations, notice, and press from third parties, thereby building up the authority of your digital assets.

These three areas work together to ensure that search engines can match your content to their perceived intent of searchers' queries. By mastering these fundamentals, you can increase your chances of achieving high, broad, and highly-converting rankings.

E-A-T is a concise description of Google's ranking goals, standing for Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness.

Google's Search Quality Raters, a program they've relied on since at least 2005, use E-A-T to evaluate the quality of search results.

E-A-T is not a new ranking factor, but rather a way to classify essential ranking factors, like "Do-Know-Go".

Google's ranking factors are becoming sophisticated, making it harder to fake, exploit, or take shortcuts around them.

Expertise is about providing accurate, trustworthy, and beneficial information to users, which is not new but now has a concise way to encapsulate it.

Content written by experts is more likely to have a positive user search experience, but Google's goal is to favor content that appears to be written by an expert.

To optimize for content quality algorithms, aim for content that directly addresses the user's search intent, uses verifiable facts, and provides depth in the topics.

Each page on your website needs to be high quality, as users are likely to navigate to any of your other pages.

Google recognizes that the web is a network of documents, and they don't want to send users to pages that link to low quality pages.

A unique perspective: Content Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

Expertise is a crucial aspect of SEO, and it's not just about having an expert write your content. Google wants to favor content that appears to be written by an expert, even if it's not actually written by one.

Content written by experts is more likely to have all the features that create a positive user search experience. To optimize for content quality algorithms, you need to aim for content that clearly and directly addresses the user's search intent, uses verifiable facts as the basis of the answer, and provides depth in the topics used to deliver a satisfying answer.

Recognizing this, Google's goal is to favor content that is high-quality, factual, applicable, and readable. This means you need to make sure your content is well-researched and accurate, and that it provides value to the user.

Here are some key features of high-quality content that Google looks for:

By focusing on these features, you can create content that is more likely to rank well in search engines and provide a positive user experience.