What is Organic Search?
Organic search, also referred to as natural search, are unpaid search results. The opposite to pay-per-click advertising (paid search results). Organic search results are based on the user’s search intent, links, authority, and other organic search rankings.
Organic vs. Paid Search
Organic search involves:
- Free of cost
- More effective in the long run
- Boosts unpaid rankings in search results
- Requires continuous efforts to display sites at the top of the page
- Maintenance of SEO strategies required
Paid search involves:
- Requires a cost
- Good for short term results
- Ranks site at the top of the page quickly
- Boosts paid rankings in search results
Why is organic search important?
Organic search strategies in digital marketing have been proven to be effective in the long-term, in contrast to paid search results, despite it providing immediate results. Organic sites are often more trusted, leading to higher conversion rates and greater return on investment (ROI).
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- Cost-effective. Companies can leverage the cost-effectiveness of organic search. Paid search results can be costly to implement. Organic traffic costs nothing at all, especially if you use the right SEO techniques. It doesn’t have a budget and companies can continually expand without worrying about their expenses. 2.
- Competitive advantage. An organic search improves the visibility of the targeted keywords. When used effectively, there would be no need for paid strategies.3.
- Long-term results. Organic search can offer optimised websites for a longer time, as they don’t rely on cost-per-click expenses.
Factors impacting organic search
All businesses like to be in the top three ranking pages of Google. Various factors can get websites to the premium spot on the SERP.
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- Backlink. A link from a website that links to the company’s website. Backlinks help search engines understand how relevant a website is. Backlinks ensure organic traffic and index websites.
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- Internal and external link. Websites need to be ranked in order to be ranked. Internal links direct you to an internal page on a website, this helps search engines know about the structure of the website and increase its visibility. External links direct users to a page on a different website.
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- Media. Adding images and videos along with written text can provide SEO benefits and rank higher in search results. It also leads to conversions and revisits.
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- Technical. Page speed is an important factor, as the quicker the page loads, the higher it ranks. Apart from the page speed, length of URL is important. Shorter URLs rank better in search results, they are also easy to type and remember, improving user experience.
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- Encryption. Most websites support HTTPS, which is a secure connection. Using HTTP displays a not secure sign next to the domain which can cause users to leave the website. Google values HTTPS a lot more and ranks it higher in SERPs
Measure organic search
If a company does not measure how its performing, it could lose out on opportunities to boost organic search traffic. By using different metrics, they can better understand the site’s performance and boost their ranking in google search.
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- Page views. Offers page views per session with total pages visitor visits on a certain page.
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- Bounce rate. Percentage of visitors that leave a page without viewing other pages. This could be due to slow load time or a page doesn’t contain much information. The quicker a user leaves the page, the higher the bounce rate.
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- Keywords. Businesses have to track their keywords to ensure their organic SEO strategy is effective. They need to identify which keywords are most important for their business and they can use google analytics to measure the performance.
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- Visitors. This tracks the number of websites on a site and how interested they are in a site. Businesses should ensure to create engaging content that will rank higher and boost traffic.