An Organic Edge: 4 Tips For Enhanced, Affordable SEO

A successful website needs to draw traffic and with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising rising in cost, more websites are turning to organic SEO to pull readers in – but it’s a beneficial shift. Organic SEO is more appealing to customers, builds up your site in a positive way, and increases your rankings to a greater extent than PPC ads, all while falling within a narrow budget. But what exactly is it? What makes organic SEO different and how can you use it to your advantage?

The 411 On SEO

Organic SEO, at its core, is about following search engine rules. To succeed within those rules, you need to build a responsive site that’s mobile-friendly, format your videos correctly, balance your keyword density, and develop a social media presence. You also need to keep an eye on updates to the SEO rules and best practices because failure to keep up with adjustments can leave you at the bottom of the rankings barrel.

Is that it? That’s what it takes to succeed at organic SEO? Of course, it isn’t that simple. Mastering the basics will get you on the map, but these tricks will help you lead your field.

Know Thine Competitor

You know who your competitors are, but do you understand their SEO strategy? The most successful businesses work with SEO experts who can provide competitor analysis. Competitor analysis reports offer market insights that can help you understand your audience, pick stronger keywords, and outrank other companies in your niche. In the case of local businesses, these reports offer special notes on regional interests.

Build Better Backlinks

Most bloggers are aware that they need to build great content on their own websites, but many miss out on another key factor: backlinks. Backlinks are links on other sites that refer back to your blog. You need to get others to link to you – or you can link to yourself from other locations.

One way to increase your exposure and build your backlinks is by writing guest posts for reputable sites. Talk to bloggers you respect and ask if you can post on their site or share testimonials on brand pages while linking back to your blog. Backlinks help tie your blog to a larger online conversation.

Go Under The Surface

Some of the core factors that make organic SEO work aren’t visible to the readers on your site. That includes increasing your site speed, building in header tags (h1, h2, and so on), and making sure you’re using an https:// URL, not the older http://.

You should also add meta tags relating to your content and fill out your post’s excerpts or snippets. These excerpts appear when readers search for your site or share it on social media, making them especially important for building a following.

Dig Into Data

Once you have all of your core features in place, the last thing you need to do to build up your organic SEO is to look at your site data. That includes analyzing Google Analytics and SERP reports, checking your dwell time, and looking at information like geographic spread, number of hits, and unique visitors. Your goal should be to extend dwell time, increase the number of hits, and grow your audience at a steady rate. And if you’ve building backlinks, creating high-value content, and pushing your content on social media, this should be no problem.

You can have a higher quality, highly ranked website and it doesn’t take the fortune you’d spend on PPC advertising. Using organic SEO is an affordable way to turn your website into a winner and attract a wide readership. What’s holding you back?