Organic SEO

Organic SEO is an often overlooked part of online marketing. Organic SEO involves optimising your website so that it appears at the top of the search results for specific keywords. Many businesses have moved away from organic SEO to focus on paid search because of the high potential returns and immediacy that paid search offers. However, SEO can deliver a phenomenal ROI and remains a useful and effective longer-game marketing technique.

Organic search results are the ones that appear underneath the ads in Google and other search engines. If a user clicks on your link in the organic search results, then you do not have to pay for that click. Organic SEO is valuable because a well-optimised site can stay at the top of the SERPs for a long time, meaning that you will continue to get masses of traffic from organic search for a long time after the initial SEO work is completed. With paid search, the moment you stop paying, the clicks will stop coming.

There are many optimisation techniques that can improve your rankings in the search engines. The foundations of organic SEO can be grouped in six categories which include content, user signals, technical, user experience, social signals and backlinks. These areas are now an important part of SEO thanks to Google's algorithm updates. Google has reworked their ranking algorithm to emphasise rewarding a high-quality, user-focused experience and penalise websites with artificial or over-optimised black hat activity.

Link building is still an important, but often misunderstood part of organic SEO. Many businesses make the mistake of assuming that having a high number of links is the only thing that matters. This is not the case. The quality and relevance of the links are far more important than the number of links and websites can now achieve high rankings with less links than their competitors.

If you are planning a link-building campaign, focus on acquiring links from blogs and websites that are directly related to your niche. Do not go on a massive link-building campaign in which you acquire a large number of links in a short time. Instead, engage in blogger outreach, submit guest blog posts to popular blogs and news websites, do some marketing based on high-quality press releases but don't release these on your own website and build a small number of links each time. A steady small flow of links will serve you much better from an SEO point of view without being penalised.

Organic SEO is just one part of online marketing, but it is something that will benefit from most other marketing efforts. Instead of trying to fool the search engines into ranking you well, focus on social media, community engagement and blogger outreach, as well as giving your consumers and website visitors the information they want. All of these things will have the side-effect of improving your online footprint and will help you to rank better in the search engines.