Organic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a way of enhancing the visibility of your website. The more ‘visible’ your website is to the search engines, the more likely it is that your website will appear on page 1 of the search rankings. The importance of this is that the first five organic search results get nearly 70% of all the clicks. In turn this will drive high quality through to your website and are therefore much more likely to convert visits into sales. Before we look at the benefits of organic SEO, it’ll be useful to go into a bit more detail about what SEO is.
What is organic SEO?
Organic SEO is a slow and steady way of getting more traffic to your website. Its success relies on a number of different ranking factors including good quality content that is rich in the right keywords (which depends on the quality of your keyword research), in combination with high quality, relevant internal links and external links (also known as link building), photos, videos and illustration, site speeds, user experience, H1 tags and meta titles, meta descriptions, indexing, as well as technical SEO and site security.
It can take up to six months of constant work for a brand new website to be recognised by the search engines enabling your brand to rate more highly in the organic rankings. And once you’ve reached this point, you must constantly add new, quality content to keep your website firmly at the front of the search engine results pages. If you drop back further than the first two or three pages of results, you will need to amend your organic SEO strategy including content creation.
What’s the difference between SEO and PPC?
One way of speeding up the process of getting people to visit your website is to do paid Pay-Per-Click ads (PPC). As the name suggests, every time someone clicks the link from the advert to your website, you will be charged. It is a good way of driving traffic to your website in a shorter space of time to help improve your rankings, but you must never rely on PPC alone.
As long as you are always adding new content to your website and keeping an eye on all the elements that affect it, organic SEO is always working. PPC is totally dependent on your budget – as soon as your pre-arranged budget runs out, you will not have any more visitors. With SEO, there is no limit on the number of people who will find out about your brand and visit your website.
Benefits of organic SEO
If you’ve been pondering the benefits of organic SEO, here are a few pointers as to why it pays to invest in ensuring your website becomes (and stays) top of the search results for your chosen keywords.
- Cost-effective – SEO is recognised as one of the most cost effective marketing channels.
- High ROI – SEO offers the highest return on investment than any other form of marketing.
- Better targeted traffic – The visitors you bring to your site through organic search are more likely to be actively searching for your products and services, helping you climb to number one ranking in the organic results.
- Long-term results – Once implemented, organic SEO can leave you with long-term positions and rankings. PPC can bring in a lot more traffic, but this will only provide short-term results.
- 24/7 promotion – The internet never sleeps and by investing in organic SEO you can rest assured that your brand will get exposure all day, every day, radically improving your brand visibility.
- Increased sales – SEO can help boost your sales, enquiries and prospect lists.
- Cross-browser compatibility – SEO can ensure that your website looks great no matter which web browser you view it in.
- Increased accessibility – SEO techniques can help to make your website more accessible regardless of the device.
If you are looking for help with your organic SEO strategy or any aspect of digital marketing, please contact us to find out more.
This post has been updated from the original post in 2012.
