Organic SEO (search engine optimisation) describes the processes you can apply to get a natural ranking on search engine results pages.

Writing blog posts on a regular basis is one of the most important things you can do to consistently improve your organic SEO.

It’s easy to get drawn into thinking that SEO is hard and achieving a first page organic ranking is impossible. That’s what all the AdWords people would love you to think, but it’s not true.

Google doesn’t hate you, they just don’t understand you. – Jim Stewart

All up there are more than 200 ranking factors used in the Google algorithm. How they are applied is not public information. If your website is going to grow your business in the long term then your SEO strategy needs to be bigger than the algorithm.

What I mean is, you shouldn’t get bogged down in understanding or overcoming the algorithm for good organic ranking.

If your site is configured properly and you publish great content then higher search rankings and increased organic traffic will come with time.

Here are a few factors that search engines consider to decide your organic ranking.

Faster = improved organic SEO.

A slow site load speed will impact on your organic SEO. The gold standard is a site load speed of less than one second. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to load then you will lose 60% of traffic. Google loves a FAST site and penalises SLOW load times with lower organic rankings.

Images are the elements most likely to be slowing down your site.

The first thing that you should check is that your images are not any larger than they need to be. 1280px is the absolutely maximum width you should need, and only half that for blog images.

Ensure that your images are saved in .jpg format (unless they have a transparent background or have sharp edges, then you’ll need .png).

Once you have checked that your images are no bigger than they need to be you can compress the images to removing any of the cling on information that’s not required on a website.

If you’re site is WordPress then a plugin like WPSmush strips unnecessary information from your image files without any loss of quality.

Smaller images = faster site = happy search engines.

Optimising for the right Keywords is an essential ingredient of organic SEO.

Keywords are the search phrases that you would like your business to be found for. Each time you write a new blog post you should optimise it for a particular search term.

How to do Keyword research is a topic all of its own but it’s important to target the terms that people are actually searching for.

When planning what keywords to use consider what people would actually type into Google to find a business like yours. Optimising for jargon and industry specific terms won’t get results if they are terms the general public isn’t familiar with.

When you are writing your blog posts it’s important that you use your keyword in the same way you would use it in normal conversation. Adding the keyword over and over in an unnatural way is called keyword stuffing that won’t help with organic SEO. Search engines pick up unnatural text flow and will penalise the website ranking.

Duplicate content will lower your organic SEO.

Duplicate content is confusing for search engines. It can arise in a couple of different ways.

Publishing the same content in multiple places on your website is bad practice. This is confusing to search engines and makes you seem lazy to people.

For duplicate content on different sites search engines will rank the content that was published first. This is of particular concern to you if you are provided with content to publish on your website by a parent business or if you purchase white labelled content to publish as your own.

In terms of organic SEO it’s a much better investment for you to have unique content written for your site. Quality is really important when it comes to blogging to build organic search engine authority.

Links can be both good and bad for organic SEO. Choose wisely.

Links to and from your site are useful to help search engines understand what your website is about and how trustworthy it is.

Adding relevant links to your own blog posts is one way to build this understanding. Links back (backlinks) to your site from other trusted sites show that you are also a trustworthy site. Paying for backlinks is a bad strategy and can result in your site being penalised.

If someone is offering you cheap SEO or guaranteed ranking then it’s likely they’re using backlinks.

Linking to other, relevant blog posts that provide additional information is a straightforward strategy for you to start with. If the content you write is useful then backlinks will occur organically because other people link to what you’ve written.

When you create links to different pages or posts put the link on descriptive keywords rather than CLICK HERE. This gives context to where the link goes and enables the search engine to better understand.

User experience is key to higher organic SEO.

It goes without saying now that if your website isn’t mobile responsive then your organic SEO won’t be great. More than 50% of your website traffic is likely to be on mobile.

If you want to improve your organic search ranking then a properly configured, organised site with well written, up to date and useful content is what you need.

We enjoy the challenge of getting your website ranking higher. We’re also really good at it both tactically and strategically.

The best way to get started is to have your website audited. We offer a thorough auditing service where we’ll identify areas where you’re doing well and where there’s room for improvement. We’ll put together a game plan on how to improve SEO for your business.

The cost of your audit can be credited against any optimisation work that you then engage us to complete. Click HERE to book your website SEO Audit.