What is Organic Search?

Organic search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of naturally appearing higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Organic search is one of the most effective channels for getting traffic or conversions because it is free – compared to paid search where you have to pay for your placement and clicks – and users understand that you are relevant to it, they have entered.

A very lame joke in the SEO industry goes, “The best place to hide a dead body is on page two of Google because no one will look there.”

Pretty lame, but the point is, if you’re not on the first page of SERPs, no one will see your pages.

Think about the last time you went to page two of Google to do something like read an article or buy a product. It doesn’t matter what you tried to do; there’s almost no way you went to page two to do that.

We may use many strategies for organic search, such as keyword research and content optimization or solving technical problems that prevent a user from accessing the website.

In this article, we will focus on the different ways you can increase your organic visibility, how SEO works, why this channel is important for your business, and how to get started with organic search.

How Does Organic Search Work?

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The simplest way to refer to organic search is to think about what is the most relevant search result for a user to see when they enter a specific keyword or query into Google.

Organic search is a process that consists of various digital marketing strategies to ensure that our result appears first or at least on the first page of search engine results.

Appearing at the top of Google is not a magic trick. It requires multi-departmental coordination and collaboration, executive buy-in, a talented team of marketers and SEO professionals, and a viable way to track and monitor your results.

Organic search consists of a variety of techniques such as keyword research, content optimization and creation, technical auditing and offline marketing strategies.

The goal of organic search is to ensure that the user has a good experience on your website and landing pages and gets the answer they’re looking for – whether it’s consuming content, comparing two things to each other, or buying a product.

Google doesn’t care about organic search. What Google cares about is making sure its users find unique, useful and relevant content for what they’re looking for.

If you can match your content to the user’s heart and mind, then you can ensure that Google rewards your efforts and shows your page higher in the SERPs.

There are many different ways you can create a good user experience on your website.

Organic search is divided into three main categories: relevance, visibility and authority.

These factors can help pages rank higher on the SERPs, ideally on page one.

Those who work in SEO need to collaborate with a number of different departments to ensure that you can continue to deliver the best user experience to your customers.

SEO professionals must work with the content team to create high-quality content. They also have to work with the development team to make sure their website is technically sound, and finally they have to monitor all of those results to make sure what they’re doing is working.

When working with the development team, ensure that the content you create loads quickly and is easily found by both search engines and users.

One of the best ways to ensure that this content is found is by linking to your relevant content internally. This makes it easy for Google and users to find your content and understand its related content.

Page and website speed is also important to keep in mind as Google values this as it relates to user experience.

Think about how many times you’ve left a website because it’s slow to load – so it’s important to consider this when creating content.

As you can see, there are many different factors and teams involved in making sure your website is in good shape, all of which lead to successful SEO efforts.

One of the best ways to get more buy-in around SEO is to show other team members and departments the impact it can have on your business, brand awareness and online visibility.

Why Organic Search Is Important For Your Business

Organic search is important to your business because your consumer spends a significant amount of time searching for answers to questions or problems on Google.

Today, there are over 2 trillion searches on Google every single year.

Additionally, most of your website traffic is from organic search – whether you realize it or not.

With the growth of mobile, every day Google is seeing about 15-20% of queries that it has never seen before.

Think about how often you type something into Google on your smartphone, whether it’s to search for an actor’s latest movie, find a new product, look up a place, or type something personal that you don’t want to ask anyone else.

The bottom line is that Google is where your customers go to begin their buyer’s journey, so it’s important to make sure you invest in organic search so you can rank on page one for relevant search terms.

The old way of thinking about SEO was to create content and then tell the search team to “go SEO this” article and hope high rankings follow.

Instead, invest in search intelligence at the beginning of the content creation process. This way you can inform the content team what to include in their content or what type of content to create.

If you continue to think of the SEO team as the caretakers of the organization, then your organic traffic will never really increase.

You need to be more proactive with your search data and use that information to drive what you do internally and create an effective SEO strategy and program.

Whether we like it or not, people use search engines for every single thing in their daily lives, so we need to start investing more time in SEO in the same way that companies dedicate so much time to paid search.

The Difference Between Paid & Organic Search

The main difference between paid and organic search is that paid search is a pay-to-play traffic source, while organic search is achieved by providing the best results for a given search.

Typically, paid search is listed at the top or bottom of the SERP with an “Ad” label. All that exists below these paid ads are the organic search results.

Screenshot from Google Search for Website Builder, October 2022

Paid search is a short-term strategy to appear on search engines because the second you stop paying for ads, you stop showing.

Organic search is a long-term strategy for appearing on search engines because you can consistently rank on page one for years by implementing only small adjustments to the ranking page.

It’s a much more cost-effective way to get traffic and conversions because you’re not paying every time someone clicks on your ranked content.

Organic search results can be displayed in many ways: standard blue links, answer box results, People Also Ask, local packages, images, videos, etc.

We need to prioritize organic search because the click-through rate (CTR) of organic search results is almost ten times higher than paid search.

Think about how often you skip the ads on YouTube or fast forward during commercials. Just by looking at user behavior, we know that paid ads are no longer the most appropriate place to go for information.

Users prefer to navigate and click on the organic listings because they know that this content will get the response they want.

I’m not saying you should avoid paid search altogether, but there should be a healthy balance and synergy between your paid and organic efforts rather than focusing all your resources on the short-term gains of paid search.

You can create a highly effective digital marketing strategy by ensuring synergy between the channels.

For example, if there are keywords you’re not ranking for on page one, you should start increasing your paid spend on those keywords while you work on optimizing related content.

Also, assume there are keywords you’re already ranking for on page one. In that case, you can reduce your paid spend on these phrases – because you don’t need to pay for clicks if you’re already organically positioned at the top of the results.

Some case studies (Disclosure: I work at Conductor) say that showing up in paid and organic listings is better as users remember the brand name.

Overall, by using data between the two channels, you can find out and test what is best for your organization.

How To Get Started With Organic Search?

There are many different levers you can pull in SEO to start getting things done.

The way you should think about getting started with SEO is by making sure your site’s content is relevant and visible.

To break this down at a high level, you need to create relevant content and ensure that this content is accessible and technically sound.

The Voice Of The Customer

First, you should create content that matches the voice of the consumer. Keyword research is the bread and butter of creating content. It is the very first step to take when considering creating a landing page.

If you don’t match your content to the voice of the customer, no one will find it. By doing keyword research, you can ensure that your high-quality content uses phrases that customers are actually searching for.

Monthly search volume (MSV), or the average number of people searching for a phrase each month, is an important metric, but it’s also a directional metric.

You must first of all prioritize the relevance of your keyword. Otherwise, since the SERP is so competitive, you may bring unqualified traffic or never have the chance to rank.

A Sound Technical Foundation

Second, when you create your content or website, you want to make sure that the technical foundation is sound.

From a high level, Google or any other search engine crawler finds your content by crawling all the links on your site and following all the links that are available.

Next, the search engines begin to analyze these links to see what the content is on the page and store this in the search index.

Finally, when a user searches for something on the search engine, it serves that content to the user and ranks the most relevant landing pages according to what the algorithm feels will provide the best answer.

This is important because if you make it hard for Google to find your content, or if you create content that loads really slowly, then Google won’t show that content to users.

Monitor And Measure Results

Finally, monitor and measure the results of the strategies you implement.

By using SEO software for businesses or a smaller SEO tool, you can keep track of our keyword rankings, market share, and organic traffic to better understand what’s happening and when changes are needed.

Half the story is about doing the research and implementing the changes. The other half digs into reporting to see what works and doesn’t.

Conclusion

Organic search is the best way to ensure users find your content. You don’t pay for these clicks; you serve them.

Users understand that the content that appears at the top of search engine results is the most relevant and useful content for what they are searching for.

By making life easier for Google, you also end up reaping the rewards as your content and website receive more organic traffic, conversions and recognition internally.

Becoming more visibly organic is not an easy task.

There will always be a lot of trial and error before you find out what works. That’s the best part of SEO though – once you figure out what works, you can replicate those gains and experiences across the entire site.

SEO is a very fast paced industry that is always changing.

By staying up to date on algorithm updates, new result types and industry trends, you can ensure that your site is always at the top of search results.

Hopefully, this article has given you a basic understanding of what organic search is, how you can take action, and why it’s important to your business. To learn more about SEO and advanced topics, check out SEJ’s SEO for Beginners Guide.

Featured image: smunu/Shutterstock

How do you identify organic searches?

A free Google Search listing that appears because it’s relevant to someone’s search terms. Non-organic search results are paid ads. The ads above organic results contain an “Ad” field. The ads to the right of organic results have an “Ad” box above them.

What is local SEO vs SEO?

Local SEO is a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that helps your business become more visible in local search results on Google. Any business that has a physical location or serves a geographic area can benefit from local SEO.

Why local SEO is important for SEO? Benefits of Local SEO Better Online Visibility: Local SEO activity, such as citation and link building, increases your online visibility. This makes your business easier to find for new customers. More in-store foot traffic: Greater local visibility brings more foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar location.

Which is better local SEO or paid search?

SEO is also more effective for local searches and can increase your online presence for longer. Pay-per-click (PPC), on the other hand, is an acquisition strategy that requires you to spend advertising money to get your content in front of an audience when they search for specific keywords online.

Which is better organic or paid traffic?

Increases credibility Users are much more likely to click on your site if it is at the top of the regular search results (and not the paid ads section). In fact, one study found that 53% of web traffic comes from organic search, while only 27% comes from paid ads.

Is it worth paying for local SEO optimization?

Well, yes, it is! No one can argue the value of ranking in Google. However, the question in general is whether SEO is worth paying for in the end. Like any smart businessman, you have to weigh your options.

Which is better SEO or paid ads?

Key PPC vs. SEO take-aways Improving SEO can help your website rank higher on Google Search by making it more relevant to users, while PPC ads like Google Ads are paid online ads that allow businesses and website owners like you to bid on ability to display an ad next to searches on Google.com.

Is local SEO paid?

How much does Google charge for SEO? Google does not charge for SEO. However, Google has free resources and tools for those who want to learn how to do SEO.

Organic search refers to the non-paid search results from a search engine. These results cannot be bought or influenced by advertisers; these are the ones the search engine considers to be most relevant to the user’s search query.

What is organic and inorganic search? Organic results provide long lasting results while inorganic results provide immediate ranking and drive huge traffic. The biggest negative factor for inorganic results is that the ranking drops as soon as you choose not to stop running ads.

Why is it called organic search?

Organic search refers to the search results from a search engine that cannot be influenced by paid advertising. Organic search results are ranked according to their relevance to the keyword.

What does organic mean in Analytics?

What is an organic search in Google Analytics? When you see organic search traffic in Google Analytics, it refers to the traffic that came to your website through unpaid search results on search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Organic traffic in Google Analytics can be found under the Acquisition section.

What does organic search mean?

Organic search results are the unpaid listings that appear on a search engine results page (SERP). These results are based on factors such as relevance to the user’s search query, inbound links, valid search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and domain authority.

Why is SEO called organic?

Organic SEO is the practice of using White Hat SEO strategies to increase traffic to your website and improve your website’s presence in non-paid search engine results. The word organic is used to distinguish between natural search engine optimization methods and paid tactics for ranking in SERPs.

What is meant by organic search?

What is organic search with example?

What is an organic search? Organic search results are the unpaid results that appear on a search engine results page after a query. In the example below, when I typed “athletic clothing” into Google, the unpaid results are all part of the organic search.

What is an example of an organic search?

What are organic search keywords?

An organic keyword is a keyword used to attract free traffic through search engine optimization (SEO). Organic keywords contrast with pay-per-click (PPC) keywords, which are offered through paid search marketing campaigns.

What is organic search marketing?

Organic search marketing, a form of organic marketing, improves your website’s position in search results through optimizations. When users search, search engines generate organic search results based on your site’s relevance to a user’s search query.

What is organic traffic example?

Organic traffic is the visitors who land on your site from unpaid sources, aka essentially free traffic. Organic sources here include search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing.

What is better SEO or PPC?

We’ve seen that SEO click-through rates are higher than PPC, which means it has the potential to drive significantly higher amounts of organic traffic your way. In addition, your price per cost of acquisition (CPA) be much lower when using SEO than PPC.

Is PPC the same as SEO? The Difference Between SEO and PPC Advertising SEO and PPC advertising are two different strategies at both ends of the same digital marketing spectrum. SEO services focus on driving organic traffic to your website, while PPC advertising is about displaying paid ads on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Should I learn PPC or SEO?

Marketers tend to choose PPC because it allows them to get results so much faster and with less effort. This is why paid search is such a valuable approach. While in SEO it is impossible to see results all at once, with paid search services you can start seeing results immediately after submitting an ad.

How do I choose between PPC and SEO?

Ask yourself, â€œWhat is my budget?â€ SEO may be best on a shoestring budget, although SEO takes longer to generate noticeable traffic. If you have a bigger budget, PPC will generate faster results, but it may take longer to reach your desired return on investment (ROI).

Is PPC considered SEO?

The difference between search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is that SEO focuses on getting traffic from organic search, whereas PPC focuses on getting traffic from paid search, social and display. In this post, you’ll learn how to decide what’s best for your business.

What is organic and inorganic search results?

A free Google Search listing that appears because it’s relevant to someone’s search terms. Non-organic search results are paid ads.