Organic SEO 2018: What You Need To Know
What is organic SEO?
Organic SEO is all search engine optimisation that comes naturally to a website, i.e. not paying to improve SEO through services such as Google’s PPC (Pay Per Click Adverts). The main goal for organic SEO is to rank your website as high as possible on a search engine in a non-paid, algorithm-based way. Ranking your website via organic methods is usually seen as more effective than paid SEO for a number of reasons:
- Organic SEO is seen as more trustworthy than paid SEO as search engines (i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc) rank websites for being the most relevant and beneficial for its users whereas paid ads (paid SEO) is less about user experience.
- Paid SEO is ranked above organic SEO, however, it is clearly stated that they are adverts (due to the little box next to results) which are proven to be offputting for web users to click on.
- Organic SEO has a higher CTR (Click Through Rate) on average than paid SEO
However, organic SEO usually comes at a greater cost than paid SEO. Organic SEO requires time, skill and resources to be executed well, whereas paid SEO can just be a PPC campaign where you only spend, for example, £30 a month on adverts.
The science behind organic SEO
Google and other search engines use crawlers (also known as spiders) to take information from websites which helps determine your websites relevancy and optimisation, this is why it important to label any asset possible on your website such as image ‘alt tags’ which tells the crawler what the image is about. These crawlers are also checking for any Black Hat (naughty) SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing (making keywords the same colour as the background making it invisible to users to try and benefit from more keywords), if a crawler sees any Black Hat activity it will potentially penalise you by decreasing your ranking. So try and avoid these tactics.
How to improve your organic SEO
Search engines will improve your ranking based on these key featured if used correctly:
- Quick website loading times, the speed of how fast your website loads is very important for both user engagement and your ranking. It is estimated that if your website takes over 3 seconds to load 40% of users will not proceed to your website. Search engines also directly penalise you for slow loading speeds.
- Dwell time, how long users stay on your website for, this proves that your website is interactive and clearly relevant
- Use keywords appropriately
- Break up content using header tags
- Backlinks, backlinks are links that come from other websites to yours, these are extremely effective to help boost SEO but backlink spamming can also get you penalised.
- Use outbound links, outbound links increase credibility that search engines appreciate
- Use images and videos as well as text, this relates to dwell time as it’ll make your website more interesting and interactive.
- Make sure ALL links on your website (outbound & inbound) are working correctly
- Encourage social media sharing, this will also improve your website traffic
- Optimise your website for mobile!!! Mobile is becoming more and more relevant every day, no mobile optimisation = bad website!
