Organic SEO – What is it?

Organic SEO – What is it?
 
Organic SEO – What is it?
 

Organic SEO – What is it?

Search engine optimization – SEO for short – is multifaceted. Organic SEO is an important part of it: content that Google and other search engines find so valuable that they voluntarily recommend it to their users – your customers. What does organic SEO mean and how does it work? Let's take a look together.

07.01.2020
3 min.
Monika Wolf Weber
Monika Wolf Weber

Search engine optimization – SEO for short – is multifaceted. Organic SEO is an important part of it: content that Google and other search engines find so valuable that they voluntarily recommend it to their users – your customers. What does organic SEO mean and how does it work? Let's take a look together.

What is organic search engine optimization?

Organic SEO (search engine optimization) means that Google recognizes the content on your website as important to its customers. And this happens naturally, or "organically." You can't buy organic ranking with money; you can only influence it through organic SEO. This works by optimizing your website based on as many relevant criteria as possible. This allows it to be easily read and evaluated ("ranked") by search engines.

Screenshot showing the placement of organic SEO and SEA
Search engines rank organic SEO results and paid SEA ads differently.

Organic SEO consists of various components. Firstly, there's the content, meaning the content of your websitethat's tailored to search engine algorithms. This includes SEO texts, UX writing, images, and videos. Secondly, successful organic search engine optimization also naturally includes technical aspects such as page loading speed, clean programming, and so on.

Why organic SEO?

A recent study from 2020 clearly shows that over 85% of people prefer clicking on organic resultsto paid search ads. Organic SEO therefore plays a crucial role for search engines.

Screenshot: Organic search is more popular than ads
A study by the American marketing agency Ignite Visibility proves that the majority of all searchers prefer organic search results to paid ads.

Most people now suffer from a kind of ad fatigue: Just because search engines show them more ads doesn't mean that searchers actually click on them.

In fact, the opposite seems to be true. This, in turn, means that for online marketing, organic search engine optimization pays off more in the long runthan a quick increase in revenue through paid search results.

How does organic SEO work?

Search engines use automated computer programs to evaluate the quality of a website. These so-called bots examine your website by repeatedly "crawling" it. In this way, the bots check your online presence against various criteria that are constantly changing.

Organic SEO is part of search engine optimization
Statistics can help you visualize the success that organic SEO brings to your business.

For example, Google's search algorithm uses several hundred ranking factors to determine your page's organic SEO relevance. The crawlers then report back to Google which and how many of the relevant criteria are met.

Search engines constantly re-evaluate your website. And if you regularly optimize it with relevant SEO content, it will perform a little better each time. The result: Your website will be found more and more easily by Google.

How well your website ultimately performs depends on many different factors.

Four important questions you can use to measure the success of your organic search engine optimization are: How…

  1. How strategic is your on-page optimization?
  2. … is your SEO content good and unique (“ unique content ”)?
  3. Are your employees active in SEO?
  4. Is your topic relevant?

You can't influence all of these criteria yourself. However, an experienced SEO expert can assess your chances of success quite accurately after extensive keyword research. Furthermore, there's always more than one solution and approach in the field of organic SEO.

How quickly does organic SEO take effect??

There are countless websites on the internet. Furthermore, the capacity of search engine bots is limited. Therefore, it can take a while for your site to be crawled and evaluated. The current competitive landscape, your domain's history, the dynamics of your topic, and other factors also determine how much time and effort it takes to improve your ranking in organic search results.

You can usually expect to see noticeable results over several months. Organic SEO is therefore a medium- to long-term investment – ​​one that pays off in the long run.

In the short term, it therefore makes sense to supplement organic SEO with inorganic measures. With Google AdWords, for example , you can buy or rent a ranking position. This other type of search engine optimization is called SEA ( Search Engine Advertising ) .

Organic search engine optimization measures

An important foundation for all organic search engine optimization measures is, of course, a solid SEO content strategy, thorough on-page optimization , and exciting content that takes the criteria of organic SEO into account.

If you are looking for more information or advice on SEO content, feel free to contact me!