Organic SEO is all about creating high-quality content that resonates with your target audience. By focusing on relevance, accuracy, and user experience, you can attract and retain a clearly defined audience.
Keyword research is key to understanding what your audience is searching for. According to our research, using long-tail keywords can increase your chances of ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) by up to 90%.
Creating high-quality, engaging content is essential for organic SEO success. This includes using a conversational tone, optimizing images, and structuring your content in a way that's easy to read and understand.
By implementing these organic SEO tips and strategies, you can improve your website's visibility, drive more traffic, and ultimately, boost your online sales.
Expand your knowledge: High Authority Link Building
Organic SEO Basics
The Google search algorithm is a powerful tool that automatically determines what each page is about, what queries it should rank for, and in what position. This is where keyword research comes in, helping us figure out what people are typing into Google and optimizing our pages based on that.
The internet is far too large for Google to manually decide what each page is about, so we need to do the research ourselves. Just look at the image below to see how much search demand can vary from keyword to keyword.
- The oblivious category includes folks who have no idea what keyword research is or have simply never done it. They believe in sayings like "build it and they will come" and generally get zero search traffic.
- The rushers have heard of the concept and it makes sense to them, but they're not using any tools for it. They try to remember to stuff in a few keywords here and there and occasionally it might even work.
- The reachers have looked at the search volumes, chosen the highest volume ones, and they will never be able to compete for them.
- The enlightened category includes folks who have read the post, seen some data, and know they've got to make a keyword plan before optimizing for anything.
Optimize Your Pages
The most important places to place your keywords are in the page title, URL, H1 tag, and sub-headings. This is where Google looks first to get a feel for what your page is about.
If you can guess the general topic of a page just by looking at its URL or a specific heading, then you're likely using keywords effectively. If not, it's time to put those keywords in there.
You can't write a piece of content without targeting a keyword, but if that's the case, make sure you have a content promotion strategy other than organic search.
Google is great at understanding related words and phrases, so don't be afraid to use synonyms and variations of your target keywords.
To optimize for search intent, analyze the pages that are already ranking for your target keyword and see what they've done. Look at the type of search intent behind the user's query – what are they trying to accomplish?
The first angle to take when analyzing search intent is to identify the type of search intent itself.
To figure out how often to use your target keywords, look at the top competitors for your keyword and map out the lowest and highest keyword density. Aim for the higher end, but don't overdo it – velocity and consistency are key.
Keyword density also depends on content length, so make sure to take that into account.
A poor site structure can leave some pages neglected, so make sure to link to important pages from your homepage and other relevant pages. Ideally, every important page should be within 3-4 clicks from your homepage.
Here are the most important places to use keywords:
- Page title
- URL
- H1 tag and sub-headings
- Meta description
- Headlines
- Title tags
- URLs
- Meta descriptions
- Heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
- Anchor text for internal links
Content Creation
Creating quality content is key to earning links and improving your website's visibility. This means your content needs to be worth linking to, which is an important point to remember.
To achieve this, you need to give people a compelling reason to link to your content. You can do this by creating unique and high-quality content that adds value to the user. This is where the E.E.A.T. acronym comes in: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Ensuring your website masters the three areas of E.E.A.T. is extremely important. Conducting keyword research and optimization, proofreading and editing your content, optimizing for mobile, and understanding your target audience are all crucial steps in creating quality content.
Using a plagiarism checker can also help identify any duplicated material, allowing you to revise and improve it before publishing. This will not only improve your content's quality but also help you avoid any potential penalties from Google.
On a similar theme: Improve Website Visibility on Google
Creating longer content is also beneficial, as it can provide more value to the user and improve your chances of ranking for multiple keywords. The majority of successful pages don't rank for just one keyword, but rather for hundreds or even thousands of variations.
Here's a simple formula to keep in mind:
- Create unique and high-quality content
- Conduct keyword research and optimization
- Optimize for mobile
- Understand your target audience
- Use a plagiarism checker to identify duplicated material
By following these steps, you can create content that's worth linking to and improve your website's visibility in the SERPs.
Get More Backlinks
Getting more backlinks is a crucial step in improving your website's organic search rankings. Link building is a vital aspect of organic SEO, and it involves acquiring high-quality, relevant links from other websites to improve your website's authority, credibility, and search engine rankings.
To build high-quality backlinks, you need to create something worth linking to. This means creating valuable, unique, and informative content that others will want to link to. Guest blogging is a successful strategy used by Ahrefs, where you write a blog post for another blog in exchange for a link back to your site.
Take a look at this: Best Link Building
You can also find sites that are already looking for contributors by searching for "[your_topic] "write for us"" or "[your_topic] "contribute"". These sites typically have a "write for us" page, and following their instructions can help you get your content featured.
To build relationships with influencers and bloggers, you can reach out to them with an SEO proposal that shows how you can benefit their website. Creating visually appealing infographics and images that people can embed into external websites is another great way to acquire high-quality backlinks.
Here are some tips for acquiring high-quality backlinks:
- Build relationships with influencers and bloggers in your niche.
- Reach out to companies you want to feature your content and have an SEO proposal ready.
- Create exciting and aesthetically pleasing infographics and images that people can embed into external websites.
Remember, not all links are created equal, and building too many links too fast can be a red flag for Google. It's essential to build links at a pace that is consistent and sustainable for your website.
See what others are reading: Reciprocal Links Seo
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is all about making your website more visible and easily crawlable by search engines. A fast-loading website provides a better user experience and can improve its ranking in search engine results. Improving site speed involves reducing the size of images, minifying CSS and JavaScript files, and using a fast and reliable hosting provider.
To ensure your website is mobile-friendly, it's essential to have a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes and devices. This will improve user experience and search engine rankings. An XML sitemap is also crucial, as it helps search engines to crawl and index your site.
Here are some key elements of technical SEO:
- Site Speed and Performance: A fast-loading website provides a better user experience and can improve its ranking in search engine results.
- Mobile-Friendliness: A responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes and devices is essential.
- XML Sitemap: Helps search engines to crawl and index your site.
- SSL Certificates: Encrypts data transmitted between a website and its visitors, making the site more secure.
- Crawl Errors and Broken Links: Should be fixed to ensure the site is properly indexed and can be easily found by search engines and users.
- Site Structure: A well-structured website is simpler for users to explore and for search engines to crawl and index.
By focusing on these technical SEO elements, you can improve your website's performance and visibility in search engine results.
Optimize Site Structure
A well-structured website is simpler for consumers to explore as well as for search engines to crawl and index. Site structure is crucial for distributing authority to inner pages.
A poor site structure can leave some pages completely neglected, and vice-versa. If a page on your site only has one link pointing to it, how important can it be?
The closer a page is to your homepage, the better it is going to rank. Ideally, every important page should be within 3-4 clicks from your homepage.
To improve site structure, set up your site in a hierarchy. Your homepage links to the most important pages and categories, which then link to sub-categories and sub-pages, and so on.
If you have a large number of posts under a single category, you can create additional categories and link to them from the navigation. Alternatively, you can increase the number of posts displayed on a single page.
Here are some tips for improving site structure:
- Create additional categories for the blog and link to those from the navigation
- Increase the number of posts displayed on a single page
- Ensure you have page numbers at the bottom of your category
You can also get more internal links to your important pages by contextually linking to them within other articles. This will help distribute authority and improve your site's overall structure.
Improving Site Speed
Improving site speed is crucial for a great user experience and better search engine rankings. Google confirmed nearly ten years ago that site speed is important, and they want their users to have the best experience possible.
A slow website is unacceptable, and Google will likely penalize it in search engine results. Pages that load faster will rank better, all else equal. Google wants users to have a fast and seamless experience, and waiting for a blank page to load doesn't fit the bill.
Discover more: Optimize Site for Google
Bad hosting companies are the number one thing slowing down websites. If your hosting company is holding back your website speed, it's time to switch. Use a tool like ByteCheck to measure your time-to-first-byte (TTFB), which indicates how long it takes for your server to respond to a request. If it's above 400-500 ms, it's time to switch hosting companies.
Excessive use of plugins and apps can slow down your website. Go through your list of extensions, disable and delete the ones you don't need, and try to find faster alternatives to the ones that are holding you back. Use GTMetrix for a breakdown of your website's performance.
Lots of big images can also slow down your website. Properly compressing these images and uploading them in the resolution they will be displayed in can cut down the size to a few hundred kilobytes. Consider using a plugin like WPRocket to take care of site speed issues in a few clicks.
Here are some key things to consider when improving site speed:
- Caching
- Content delivery networks
- Preloading
- Lazyload
- Minifying and compressing various resources
- A lot more
Ideally, you'll want every page on your site to load in less than two seconds, but three seconds as an absolute maximum for more media-heavy pages.
Analytics and Tracking
Analytics and tracking are crucial to measuring the success of your organic SEO efforts. You can't just stop at achieving top organic search engine rankings, you need to track the visitors and leads your SEO is driving.
Only half the battle is won by achieving top organic search engine rankings. Measuring your company's impact on website traffic and lead generation can help you prove your value and optimise your results.
Google Search Console can provide you with important information about how your site is performing and identify possible errors you need to fix. Google Analytics helps measure how visitors interact with your website, which is a direct result of SEO.
Using Google Analytics, you can track how well organic traffic converts to subscribers, leads, and customers. You can also track the conversions your best SEO pages are generating, both online and over the phone.
Here are some tools for tracking organic SEO progress:
- Free SEO tools: Google Analytics, SERPs.com, Bing Webmaster Tools
- Freemium tools: Ubersuggest, SEOptimer, SEMrush, Ahrefs
- Paid tools: SproutSocial, Moz Pro, Serpstat
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the foundation of a successful organic SEO strategy. It involves discovering, analyzing, and selecting the most appropriate keywords to target in your website's content.
Paying attention to the right keywords can improve your site's visibility in search engine results and drive more relevant traffic.
Keyword research is crucial because it helps you understand what your target audience is searching for. By using the right keywords, you can improve relevance for both Google and searchers.
Adding your target keywords can improve relevance. This means your website will be more likely to show up in search results and attract the right people.
Explore further: How to Improve Organic Seo
Best Practices
You don't always have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to SEO. Use existing title tag formulas and make yours magnetic, like "Terms of Sale" did, and watch traffic shoot up.
For example, optimizing content by formatting headings and subheadings using H2s and H3s and using bullet and number lists can break up walls of text and improve user engagement.
Here are some best practices to keep in mind:
- Use header tags for both user experience and search engine optimization to improve organic visibility.
- Conduct user research to improve the information architecture of your website for easy navigation.
- Make sure your website design is responsive for both mobile and web formats.
- Use relevant keywords in your header tags to enhance organic visibility.
- Optimize your content to rank for target keywords and align with user intent.
Best Practices
To improve your website's search engine rankings, it's essential to use proven formulas for title tags. Traffic shot up when a website used a simple formula like "Terms of Sale".
You don't have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to SEO. Using existing formulas can save you time and effort.
Optimizing content for user experience is crucial for improving your SEO score. The longer a user stays on your page and engages, the higher their satisfaction with your website.
Google's algorithm analyzes several factors, including UX elements, to determine what pages to pull up on their SERPs. It assesses how easily a user can navigate through the main content of your page.
Here are some tips for optimizing user experience:
- Take the time to understand your user base and provide them with relevant content to meet their wants/needs
- Conduct user research (you can use a tool like UXtweak) to improve the information architecture of your website for easy navigation
- Make sure your website design is responsive for both mobile and web formats
Using header tags is also important for both user experience and search engine optimization. Use header tags like H1, H2, H3, and so on, and include relevant keywords in these headings to enhance organic visibility.
For another approach, see: Important Meta Tags
Why Is Important?
Organic search is a game-changer for businesses, allowing them to reach potential customers actively searching for products or services related to their business.
This can result in increased traffic, leads, and sales. Without a strong online presence, finding new users and revenue can be a challenge.
Using organic SEO strategies is a long-term approach that's cost-effective, although it may require initial time and effort to strengthen your website's rankings.
As users tend to click on the first few results without noticing the "ad" or "sponsored" label, websites that rank closer to the top are seen as more trustworthy.
Applying organic SEO strategies will give you an edge over the competition, literally and figuratively, by putting your website above the rest.
By following best practices for on-page and off-page optimization, a website can improve its ranking in search results, thereby increasing its visibility and attracting more organic traffic.
Additional reading: Search Engine Results Page
Troubleshooting
If you're not seeing the desired results from your organic SEO efforts, it's essential to identify and fix any issues that may be hindering your progress.
A slow website can negatively impact user experience and search engine rankings, with a study showing that 47% of consumers expect a website to load in two seconds or less.
Ensure that your website is optimized for mobile devices, as this is now a key ranking factor, with Google stating that mobile-friendliness is a key component of its algorithm.
Regularly checking for broken links and fixing them can also improve user experience and reduce bounce rates, which can negatively impact search engine rankings.
Google's algorithm updates can sometimes cause issues, but being aware of the latest updates and adjusting your strategy accordingly can help mitigate any negative effects.
A different take: Website Rankings by Traffic
Check for Duplicates
Google doesn't like duplicate content, which is when the same content appears on several different URLs.
This can happen with eCommerce stores, especially when products belong to multiple categories, like a supplement store selling Magnesium that can be categorized under both sleep improvement and heart health.
If both categories create separate landing pages for Magnesium, it's a duplicate content issue. For example, Supplements.com/heart-health/magnesium/Supplements.com/sleep/magnesium/ are not okay.
You can use site audit tools to scan for duplicate content by default or a dedicated tool like Siteliner.
To fix this, make sure the URLs for products with parameters in them, like color options, have a rel=”canonical” element, telling Google to rank the main page URL.
For instance, if your URLs display as KarlMakesDesks.com/standing-desk-pro?color=blackKarlMakesDesks.com/standing-desk-pro?color=white, you need to add a rel=”canonical” element to point to the main page URL, /standing-desk-pro/.
Check for Cannibalization
Keyword cannibalization is a sneaky issue that can tank your rankings.
It happens when you have multiple pages competing for the same keywords, making it difficult for Google to decide which one should rank.
Some people write a lot of pointless content targeting the same keyword, which can lead to conflicting tags and categories.
For example, a website might have tags like "bitcoin-price-prediction" and "bitcoin-price-predictions" alongside a post with the title "April 1st bitcoin price prediction surge coming".
In other cases, you might see a ton of different keywords and create pages for each of them, like "Commercial ovens for bakeries", "Commercial ovens for restaurants", and "Commercial ovens for grandma".
This strategy is likely to backfire if others are only ranking with a generic "commercial ovens" page.
To identify these issues, look at your top ranking keywords in an SEO tool like Ahrefs, and click on the SERP history button to see which pages are competing for the same terms.
You might find several pages dropping in and out of the results, like a crypto website that competes for the same keyword with a different article every single week.
This not only confuses Google, but also means that any previous posts that attracted backlinks won't benefit the new articles.
Explore further: A Page Ranking Algroithm Ranks Web Pages Accroding to
Remove Google Index Errors
Removing Google Index Errors is a crucial step in troubleshooting your website's SEO. You can do this by using Google Search Console or a tool like BrowSEO to see exactly how Google sees your page.
Most web developers know very little about what Google wants and how it sees things, which can lead to issues like using HTML heading tags incorrectly.
Google doesn't just judge your website based on the one page you're focused on ranking – the overall quality of your site plays a large role in this. You can have a few great pages, but if the rest of the site is low-quality or thin content, you'll struggle.
To identify index errors, do a search in Google for "site:mydomain.com" and you'll see every page that Google has in their archive from your site. Ask yourself: is there anything anyone would ever want to Google for, to end up on this page?
Here are some types of pages that you might want to exclude from Google's index:
- Staging sites (thousands of pages of duplicate content)
- Tag pages
- Category pages (for blogs – eCommerce should leave these indexed)
- Dated archives
- Author archives
- Thank you pages
- Members-only pages
- Content you forgot existed and is now outdated
- Testing pages (landing pages, homepage variations, whatever)
- Discounts you don’t want others to find
- Your lead magnet download pages
By applying the noindex tag on these pages, you can tell Google to ignore them and not show them to users. They'll still be accessible if someone ends up on the page, but just excluded from search results.
SEO Strategy
A successful organic SEO strategy has several key components. One of them is having a linking strategy, which is crucial for technical SEO.
Internal and external links both increase organic traffic to a website. You establish relationships with other pages that are relevant to your content in your link profile.
A high domain authority is important when linking to other sites. You want to link to sites that offer value to your audience.
Guest posting is another way to earn backlinks and increase organic traffic. You post on another website and include links to your own.
Relevant keywords should be used as anchor text for backlinks. This helps Google understand that your pages are relevant for those terms.
A customized link-building campaign can be developed based on your specific business goals and target audience. This ensures the best results.
A different take: Increase Pagerank
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take for organic SEO to work?
Organic SEO typically takes 3-6 months to start showing results, with consistent improvement possible within 1 year. However, patience is key as SEO is a long-term strategy that requires time and effort to yield noticeable improvements
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