Organic SEO
When I’m searching through my Google Analytics data for my own website or for a clients, the first thing that I look for is how the website has performed in organic searches. Organic search refers to visitors that found the website using a search engine. This is essentially free traffic that can bring the bulk of the traffic to your website. Beyond that, if users are searching in Google and they stumble upon your website, they are a fairly targeted user. It’s not all that likely, unless you have used spammy SEO techniques, that they landed on your website by mistake.
What is Organic SEO?
If you’re not familiar with term “Organic SEO,” I will give you the short version. Simply put, Organic SEO is the practice of increasing your search engine rankings for Google searches that you don’t pay for. These are searches that people type into Google or another search engine and your website shows up in the results naturally.
In my opinion, Organic SEO should be where you spend the bulk of your time for several reasons:
- People naturally click on organic search results because the links are natural and no suspicious or paid ads.
- It’s FREE and who doesn’t like that?
- The results are long-lasting. High ranking content will hold it’s value in the search engine rankings bringing repeat traffic.
The Key to Organic SEO
Good quality, high value content is key, along with proper keyword research, optimizing for long-tail keywords. Combine that with good quality backlinks and you have a solid recipe for bringing organic search traffic to your website. I hesitate in saying that in order to get a lot of traffic, you need a lot of content because this leads to confusion. People think that if they just have more content, they will do better. The trick is to have more content, but more HIGH QUALITY content that’s written for your readers and your community. Every time someone says that content is the key, it just stimulates a surge in poor quality writing and that’s not what I’m talking about.
