What is Organic SEO

Below the adverts (PPC), around 70% of website searchers click on the organic results on page one and in some cases page two. It is for this reason why the organic SEO is such an important of any digital marketing campaign and should continue indefinitely.

Our Organic SEO service is not something that you can just dip in and out of. If done the right way, it can bring many new visitors to your site and increase leads, eventually turning into sales.

There are two ingredients for Organic SEO that we will discuss in this article.

• Technical SEO
• On page SEO content writing

Technical SEO

A fatal mistake that we see all the time is websites that have a lot of content but technically they are not up to scratch. Google likes to present quality to its readership and quite frankly why wouldn’t it. If a website is slow or has many broken internal links this can make for an unpleasant visitor experience.

Google will also look for things like SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certification on your website. This tells Google and visitors that any data transferred between them and the website will be encrypted and not be able to be intercepted by third parties.

We have spoken in details within various articles about maintaining your website. Well, this also helps with the technical SEO on your site. For instance if a contact form is broken because of an outdated plugin Google may penalise you for that.

There are many software packages available that will carry out a full technical audit on your website and provide a comprehensive report to action. Fixing technical errors on a website can be difficult at times so it is always better to present your technical audit report to your web company to action.

On page SEO content writing

This is an area that can be very time consuming indeed. The starting point for any SEO campaign is to carry out some keyword research. There are many ways to do this but a tried and tested way is to find local competitors and try to discover what key words they are using and how they are performing.

It is important to look at the search volume of keywords, anyone can write content and rank in Google for keywords that have 0 search volume. When we carry out our keyword analysis we always look at 100+ search volumes to start with as we know that these will make a difference. Again, there is software available for you to find out all of this information. The software we use is called SE Ranking and this software give us great insight not just into keyword research but into how our content writing efforts are doing in terms of traffic and position with Google.

Once you have your keywords you can start writing relevant content to go onto your website. The content written is usually put onto a landing page, for example our Web Design Dorset landing page has been written specifically with SEO in mind. A good number of words to start with is around the 500 mark. There are many conflicting articles around the right number of words to use when writing content but in our experience 500 minimum is the sweet spot.

Writing great content

It is true to say that over the years SEO agencies alike have written content specifically with Google in mind. This has been a tried and tested way of doing things for years. Google, on the other hand, is not content with simply having content thrown at it in a way that is not useful to its readership. With this in mind, Google is slowly becoming more human than human.

The Google algorithms can change daily but in general they roll out large changes every now and then. You do get some notice and there are websites dedicated to keeping you up to date with the algorithm changes and what they mean. In truth, the changes are not always understandable and are sometimes open to interpretation. For this reason, Google has affectively made it a level playing field for everyone.

So what does it take to write great content? Think about your audience and what they would like to know. For instance, you are reading this article because you would like to know how to improve your SEO right? It is one thing to know what your audience want but another getting the content right. Make your content rich with useful information, try to use bullet points and numbered lists and in all cases ensure that images are used.

The devil is in the detail

Yes it really is! Make sure that you use a decent SEO plugin on your site. As a WordPress house we always recommend plugins for WordPress of course but there are also plugins available for other website builders.

Our preferred WordPress plugin is Yoast. This is easy to install and very simple to use. It provides a great analysis of your content and allows you to ‘tweak’ your content to the recommended search engine optimised level.

Using Yoast also ensures that you have the right elements on your web page such as keywords, meta description and meta title. After installing Yoast each page will have a Yoast SEO section at the tail end of it. In here you will be able to set your keyword, set your SEO title and meta description. You will also be able to use this section to analyse your content as you write it. There is a lot to learn with SEO content writing and quite literally the devil really is in the detail.