Digital marketing beginners sometimes have difficulty understanding organic search and its importance to a website's long-term success. In fact, most people tend to confuse organic search with paid search, which complicates things even more.
In this post, I will explain everything you need to know about organic search marketing in simple language and clear up any misconceptions.
What is Organic Search?
Organic search refers to the results shown for a search query that excludes paid ads. Organic search results are decided based on several ranking factors, including relevance to the user’s search query, incoming links, domain authority, device, user location, and many others.
Look at the example below to understand this better:
When you type a search term in Google, you are presented with a set of results. The top part might include paid results (these are denoted by the symbols Ad or Sponsored), followed by the organic search results.
Besides Google, other search engines like Bing and Yahoo use the same display format for their organic and paid results.
Why is Organic Search Important?
Organic search is important because it is the most valuable form of traffic you can get to your website.
Organic traffic is highly targeted and more likely to convert than any other form of traffic because of ‘user intent’.
Users who type a search query into a search engine are looking for something very specific, and websites that can satisfy their intent can turn those users into customers, subscribers, or returning visitors.
To take advantage of organic search, your website needs to appear in the top 5 positions of the organic results for keywords related to it.
The reason is that the majority of organic clicks go to websites that appear on the top of the results.
What Is The Difference Between Paid Search And Organic Search?
The main difference between paid search and organic search is that paid search results are paid for and populated via an auction system, while organic search results are unpaid and decided by search engine ranking algorithms.
Both paid and organic search are part of what is known as search engine marketing (SEM).
Paid Search
When you want your ads to appear on the top positions of the search results, you can use Google Ads (for Google) or Bing Ads (for Bing) to show your ads for related searches.
The position your ads will appear is decided by an auction type system. The system takes into account a number of parameters, including:
- The location of the user
- The device used (mobile, desktop, tablet)
- The keywords the ad is configured to be shown
- The title of the ad
- The relevancy of the landing page (the page a user will see when they click on the ad)
- The maximum amount the advertiser is willing to pay for ad clicks
- Competition, i.e., how many advertisers are bidding for a top position for the particular keyword
Advertisers pay when a user clicks on an ad and visits their website. The amount paid depends on the type of keyword, competition, and other factors.
Advertisers can define the maximum amount they want to pay for a click and the total amount they want to spend for their paid ad campaigns.
Google Ads and Bing Ads are the most popular paid search platforms (also known as PPC, Pay-Per-Click).
The significant advantage of paid search is that results are almost immediate. As soon as you set up a campaign, your ads will show in the search results, and you will start receiving search engine traffic.
The big disadvantage is that you have to pay every time someone clicks on your ads, and the cost increases yearly due to competition. In many cases, the cost is too high, making the campaigns unprofitable.
For paid search to work, you need an optimized landing page, an optimized PPC campaign, and high-margin products.
Organic Search
As stated above, organic search refers to the results shown for a search query that excludes paid ads.
Search algorithms decide organic search results and can be optimized using SEO best practices.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the practice of optimizing a website to appear higher in the natural or organic results for related keywords.
SEO has three primary components (on-page SEO, technical SEO, and Off-page SEO) and several rules for each element.
Difference between SEO and SEM – Learn the difference between SEO and SEM.
Difference between SEO and PPC – Understand the big difference between SEO and PPC with examples.
How To Improve Your Organic Search Rankings
To increase your website’s visibility in search engine results, you must follow organic search marketing best practices.
In other words, you need to follow specific rules to make your website accessible to search engines and help them understand your content.
Google uses more than 255 search engine ranking factors to calculate a website's position in the search results. The most important factors to implement and improve your organic search rankings are:
1. Check Your Technical SEO
To have any chance of appearing in organic search results, your website must be indexed by search engines without problems.
Search engines scan the web during the crawling and indexing phase to find websites to add to their index.
If, during this process, they cannot find your website or you have accidentally blocked search engines from indexing your content, then your website will not appear in any searches.
So, the first thing to do is to check your technical SEO.
2. Ensure Your Website Loads Fast And Is Accessible On All Devices
The next step is to ensure your content can be accessed without problems on all devices.
Most searches are performed on mobile devices, so you must ensure your website is mobile-friendly.
Mobile-friendly means that the content is displayed on mobile without horizontal scrollbars, the text is large enough, and any navigation elements or CTA (Call to Action) buttons are easily accessible.
In addition, your web pages should load as fast as possible on all devices. Speed is not only a known ranking factor but a big usability factor.
Users like fast websites, and you must try to provide them with a fast experience.
3. Publish Content That Satisfies The User's Intent
For users to find you in the organic results, your content must have the following characteristics:
It has to be around SEO keywords - SEO keywords are the actual terms people type in the search box to search the Internet. If you publish content that users don’t want to read, you won't get any traffic even if you appear in the organic results.
It has to satisfy the user's intent - Search engines have become very good at evaluating content and understanding whether it satisfies the user's intent.
They use several factors to present the most relevant content for each query, so if your content does not provide users with what they want to read, it will not appear high in the results.
It must be high-quality and original - Search engines can easily differentiate between original and duplicate content. They aim to present users with original, high-quality content that will keep them happy and encourage them to return for more searches.
So, you need to create and publish better content than what is already published online. Content needs to be thorough, based on facts, unbiased, and written by experts on the topic.
4. Optimize Your Content For Search Engines
Before publishing content on the web, you need to optimize it for search engines. This means adding specific signals to your content to help search engines understand what your content is all about.
In the SEO world, this is known as on-page SEO and involves factors such as the title of your page, the use of keywords within your content, optimizing your images, links to other pages on your website, and many others.
5. Promote Your Website To Get More Links And Brand Mentions
Last but not least, your website must have mentions (backlinks) from other websites to appear in the organic search results.
Links play a critical role in organic rankings because search engine algorithms consider them ‘votes of trust’.
Websites with links from other trusted websites are more likely to rank higher in the organic search results than websites with fewer links.
In the SEO world, this process is known as link building, part of off-page SEO.
Key Learnings
Organic search traffic is the best type of traffic you can get for your website or blog. It is targeted, which means users visiting your site from a search engine are more likely to convert.
Unlike paid search traffic, organic traffic is free and continuous. In other words, once you achieve and can maintain high rankings for the keywords you want, you will get traffic from search engines to your website 24/7 without paying anything.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is how to get more organic search traffic.
Paid search traffic is also targeted, but you have to pay for it. Depending on the keywords you want your paid ads to show, it may cost you from a few cents to tens of dollars per click.
Once you stop the PPC campaigns, your traffic will drop, which is not a good business model.
You must include organic and paid traffic channels in your overall digital marketing plan for the best results.
