Organic Search Engine Marketing
You’ve likely heard that search engine optimization (SEO) is the heart and soul of any successful online marketing campaign. An effective SEO strategy can have outcomes that seem almost too good to be true, such as higher placement on search engine results pages (SERPs), increased site traffic, longer session times, increased brand awareness, improved online reputation, higher conversions and better sales figures. But these strategies aren’t a figment of an online marketer’s imagination as they really do provide results.
Organic SEO is often said to focus on the first goal: obtaining a higher ranking on organic search engine results pages, however, when implemented effectively, organic SEO can increase conversions and click-through rates, too. The use of the term organic in “organic SERPs” is to signify that the results appear naturally based on the search engine’s criteria and are not paid links or advertisements.
What is organic SEO?
There are a lot of ways that you can implement search engine optimization into your marketing campaign. The strategies that are aimed at creating content for humans are considered organic SEO and are sometimes referred to as White Hat SEO techniques. These tactics are recommended by any worthwhile SEO marketing firm, including Online Potential, because they promote relevant, worthwhile content that is informative and well-written.
There are several methods that are generally recommended for garnering a higher placement on SERPs.
Quality content
Providing your consumers and site visitors with quality content is the best way to build trust and improve brand reputation while serving a purpose. Consumers are going to read your content to find answers to questions about products, services, company stances, internal operations and more. Be a better company for your consumers by giving them the content they deserve. Once your content is fully developed, search engines will begin to rank you more favorably. Several of Google’s algorithm updates were released with the purpose of encouraging better content. Panda, one of the major updates, specifically targeted sites that provided low-quality content and penalized those sites. These sites typically touched on a lot of industry-specific topics and keywords, but lacked any real information.
Keywords
A lot of times when performing a search query, users will enter a string of keywords. This is a practice that has developed from a time before Google and Bing, when search engines were in their infancy and were not advanced. Using keywords was the only way to find a site, and often the rankings put sites with more iterations of the keyword in question near the top of the results page. But times have changed. Search engines are revealing sites that practice keyword stuffing (where they feature a lot of keywords but not a lot of relevant content) and penalizing them for the practice.
So, are keywords still relevant? Absolutely. But your content needs to include the keywords in organic ways that still allow the content to be readable. Search queries have changed, too. Search engines allow for full questions to be asked and return relevant results even if the exact phrase isn’t featured.
Meta tags
Meta tags are keywords and description-based phrases that are found in the code of a web page. These tags are visible to search engines, and they tell search engines what the page is all about. Meta tags are a great place to implement keywords, titles, descriptions and attributes.
Meta keywords have nearly fallen by the wayside when it comes to organic SEO due to extensive keyword stuffing tactics. Instead of trying to combat keyword stuffing, search engines just made meta keywords irrelevant.
Meta titles and descriptions are extremely useful for search engines crawling your site for indexing. The meta title is basically the title of your web page, and the description explains what information can be found on the page. The meta title and description are also the snippet of a web page that is visible to users when you perform a search.
Meta robot attributes are directions for the search engine to follow when indexing your page.
Backlinking
This is the process of having other sites includes links to your website, and it is one of the best ways to build trust with an online audience while also building brand awareness. Backlinking can also give your website, and company, credibility and a sense of authority.
Getting other sites to include a link to your website can be tricky, but it can be done through the content portion of SEO. When you provide a page of informative content, even if it’s a blog, then others who are interested in the same topic could link back to you. But, you want them to see the information and find it interesting. When you provide quality content that is well-written, informative, adds valuable insight to the conversation, presents new information, or proposes theoretical possibilities, it is easier for others to want to share and spread the content.
Look for ways to get your content into the digital hands of other bloggers, websites and media outlets. Online press releases are a simple way to present new information in a way that’s easy to backlink. Having a company blog is an excellent way to link to other sites in hopes they will link back to you. Promote your website through online directories and portals that will link to your site while also providing a profile about your company for increased publicity.
Evolution
Organic SEO is constantly evolving. It’s creating new content on a regular basis, adding more and more links to your site, fine-tuning your keywords to keep them relevant, adding a professional presence to social media sites, updating your company blog, fixing broken links or missing web pages on your website, publishing online press releases on platforms that are easily accessible, and overall, adapting to your audience/consumers in order to provide a better user experience.
Analytics
Once you have some content, web pages and designs accessible to your audience, measure the results. See how long potential consumers are spending on your landing pages before clicking through or aborting. Measure how many visitors your sites are receiving. See who’s linking back to your website. Look up the search queries people are using to find your site. All of this and more is readily available at your fingertips through analyzation software such as Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Google Webmaster Tools, and Moz Integration. With analytics and development tools, you can see how well your organic SEO strategy is doing and implement ways for your online marketing campaign to succeed.
