Getting on top of the search results pages is all the rage and for good reasons. If your content is the first thing that users see, that brings many benefits to the business. It means more brand exposure, more traffic to the site, more leads, and more sales.

But how do you ensure you secure a spot on the first page?

One answer is by working on your organic SEO.

What is organic SEO?

Organic search engine optimization is using white hat SEO techniques that can naturally increase website traffic to your site. No paid tactics for ranking in search engines.

Organic SEO requires time and investment to optimize your website and provide relevant and useful content to users. It is best used if your main goal is to grow your web presence for the long term.

5 Organic SEO techniques to get started

It can take 3 to 6 months before you see organic SEO results. It requires continued effort and patience when carrying out these organic SEO techniques.

Write high-quality content

I believe that one of the critical foundations of organic SEO is quality content. Without content, you can’t expect your website to be at the top of SERPs.

So, before you get into the nitty-gritty of technical ways to rank high on search engines, you must invest in producing high-quality content that meets Google’s standards.

You should write excellent content that will attract interest and prompt readers to share or link to it. To ensure that, you can invest in experienced writers, use expert sources to back up your content, and perform quality checks like proofreading before you publish.

Research your competitor’s best-performing pages

With organic SEO, you can’t afford to guess what content will perform best on search engines.

You can have better chances of ranking when you know what’s already working, and looking at your competitors’ best-performing pages can help.

Then, you can create similar or better content by addressing the gaps or other points for improvement.

You can first identify websites that are your direct competitors. They may not have the same business as yours, but they might be targeting the same keywords that you have.

You can use tools like Ahrefs to analyze their top-performing pages and look for patterns. Maybe they’re ranking for certain sets of keywords relevant to your niche. Maybe they’re using long-form or short-form content. Maybe they have lots of visual assets. What are the websites they are getting backlinks from?

You can use such information when designing your content strategy. Replicate what’s working and even improve on it.

Focus on search intent

When users type a query on the search bar, they have a particular goal in mind or search intent. Google says you can categorize that into three main types: informational, transactional, and navigational.

Informational is when the users want information like a guide or an answer to a certain how-to question. Transactional is when they’re ready to make a purchase, and navigational is when they’re looking for directions or want to find a specific store.

Understanding the users’ search intent can guide you in creating content that would satisfy their needs. Then, optimize your content in a way that will fulfill what the users and the search engine would expect.

One of the best ways to identify search intent is by typing a keyword on the search bar and analyzing the search results. This will give you an idea of what Google’s algorithm considers is the best match for the words that you typed.

Earn backlinks from high-authority websites

Backlinks are among the top-ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. Yet, link-building is also considered one of the most difficult organic SEO techniques to carry out. It requires time, effort, and real hard work to earn genuine and high-quality backlinks.

You can turn to digital PR strategies to scale your link-building strategies. You can write press releases, create data-driven content, and become an expert source for journalists and publishers.

Or you can also hire agencies to do link building for you, but be cautious about the quality as you don’t want backlinks obtained via black hat techniques. Jolly SEO helps companies generate backlinks using journalist outreach and white hat techniques like guest posts. Get in touch if you would like more information about our link-building services.  

Build your topical authority

The latest massive Google algorithm update has hit many websites because of a lack of topical authority. If you’re starting your organic SEO, this is something you need to work on from the very beginning.

Topical authority means your site fully covers a topic with users in mind. For example, if you’re a personal finance website, your content must revolve around that space. You can’t simply write about anything under the sun just because that keyword ranks at the top of SERPs.

When you have several pieces of content that are related, there are more opportunities for internal links, allowing Google to find your content more easily. This helps increase your topical authority, demonstrating your expertise and knowledge on the topic so that you can be a trusted source.

Conclusion

If you want to build your web presence for the long term, you must work on improving your organic SEO. While results may take a while before they materialize, employing the organic SEO techniques above can help you get started. Always remember to keep your readers in mind so you can come up with useful content that Google will also love to rank.