What Is Organic SEO?
Answer:
The term ‘Organic SEO‘ may sound like an ingredient at your local health food store, but for a business or service with an online presence, organic search ranking is something to should be aware of.
Several SEO methods or Search Engine Optimization strategies, including some that are frowned upon by Google search engine developers, could harm a business. Some can help a business grow and keep the marketing and flow of web traffic healthy.
What’s Considered Organic SEO Today?
Organic SEO falls into the latter category. It’s a method of building and marketing a business website to gain natural web traffic through Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). If completed correctly, it’s less expensive than its counterpart, inorganic SEO, which includes paid advertising. Many businesses use a healthy marketing plan containing a combination of organic and inorganic SEO strategies. Hundreds of factors determine search rankings, and each industry requires a unique SEO strategy for success.
Understanding Organic SEO
Optimizing a web page, landing page, or another online project for search engines is a great way to gain traffic from users interested in products or services.
When a user puts a phrase or keyword into their favorite search engine, they’re shown several pages of ranking results. Most users click one of the first few results with a higher value, but some end up scrolling through the dozens or hundreds of relevant listings looking for a solution to their search query.
With effective SEO, a business can get a higher spot in results listings, beating the competition and ensuring more users visit the website. Not all SEO tactics are created equally, however.
Several frowned-upon methods worked in the past, but that search engines have recently begun countering with algorithm changes. This includes spamming links to your site on irrelevant sites and forums and stuffing your articles with thousands of keywords from dictionary lists.
Organic SEO does not use these corner-cutting methods. Instead, it relies on honest, highly specific, and relevant links, tags, and keywords to promote a website and let search engines know when it’s a relevant result for search inquiries.
The term ‘Inorganic SEO’ encompasses all paid-per-click advertising methods, which can be effective in their own right, but include the downside of high recurring costs and lack the sustainability and continuing returns of organic SEO tactics.
Examples of Organic Vs. Inorganic SEO
An example of inorganic SEO is buying ads for your website that sit above standard search results. In this scenario, known as a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, the link to your site is marked as an Ad, and a company is charged each time a user clicks it.
Organic SEO, on the other hand, would include building a niche website about a specific product, providing high-quality information to users, and allowing search engines to discover the relevancy and importance of the content, increasing the likelihood they recommend the site to users through search queries.
Why Use Organic SEO?
There are many benefits of using organic SEO methods, including increasing natural, unpaid traffic, strengthening a brand’s authority on a given subject, and building sustainable traffic that won’t incur paid placement costs.
Organic SEO methods allow a business to present itself professionally on the web. If done correctly, give a company a shot at being the first search result people see when they type a phrase related to the business into one of the major search engines.
Are All Organic SEO Methods Good for Business?
As it happens, many web marketers in the past tried to play cat-and-mouse with the major search engines, cutting corners and stuffing irrelevant keywords into their websites in an attempt to unfairly gain high spots in results pages.
Today, most website owners recognize that the search engines have won this battle by improving their algorithms to bar sites using such tactics. These tactics are often labeled Black Hat Marketing, and while they are technically “organic,” they can only harm a web presence.
Conversely, “White Hat” approaches to organic SEO allow website owners the same opportunity to gain high search engine results but admittedly often require more time and work upfront. White Hat methods include tagging each image on your website with alternate text descriptions, using an appropriate amount of keywords, and creating search engine crawler-friendly links.
Organic SEO can help a website receive high-quality, interested traffic and has a much lower long-term cost than pay-per-click (PPC) inorganic SEO methods. However, there are some often-overlooked pitfalls in organic SEO marketing, such as black hat tactics, which is why an expert should be consulted when creating a marketing plan for your business.