The dream of every website owner is to get potential customers from organic search.
But what does organic search mean?
Organic search stands for all results your website gets naturally. Without any paid ads. It is impossible to influence organic results using third-party sources.
What’s more important, Google always tries to satisfy a user query. Thus, it will suggest the most relevant search results to what people are searching for online. And these results are from organic searches.
In this guide, you will get familiar with organic search in more detail.
Shall we begin?
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Types of Organic Search Results
The basic Google search result looks like this:
This standard type of search result is also known as the “blue link” result. Years ago, you could observe all Google search results as blue links. Nowadays, there are four more types of search results that you should be aware of. Let’s review them one by one:
- Featured snippets
This type of search result is a short snippet that answers the user’s query briefly. You can see featured snippets right beneath the search bar.
Featured snippets are pulled from one of the top search results.
- Top stories
Top stories cover newsworthy topics most of the time. To put it simply, users get the latest content updates related to the specific topic.
- PAA
People Also Ask box suggests more query-related questions that people might be interested in to reveal further. If you click the question, you will get a short answer taken from a topic-related page.
- Video carousel
This type of organic search results demonstrates video content related to the query people type in the search bar.
You might wonder why organic search is important?
Let’s find out!
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The Importance of Organic Search
Organic search equals free constant traffic that your website can drive. To give you a better understanding of the value of organic traffic, check out the following stats.
Visme blog gets 413K free organic traffic monthly. If Visme had to pay for this traffic, it would cost $303K. Therefore, it makes sense to produce high-quality content, optimize it for keywords, and attract your target audience free of charge.
Besides, organic search is quite important for video content as well. Google ranks YouTube videos in the featured snippets and video carousels.
So, if your videos are shown on Google organically, you can get more views for your YouTube channel. It will help improve your overall video marketing strategy.
You might wonder how to check your organic search rankings. It is almost impossible to do it manually. Likely, with the help of specific SEO tools, you can do this easily.
For instance, Ahrefs suggests a database of 450+ million keywords. Therefore, check out the “Organic Keywords” report from Site Explorer and review how your target keywords rank.
If you want to keep an eye on your organic keywords, you should use the Rank Tracker tool.
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5 Ways to Rank High in the SERP
It is a big secret how Google ranks pages. You can never know whether your page will be ranked high or end up somewhere on the “X” page with no visits at all.
But the truth is that you need to make everything possible to rank the keywords high. Otherwise, you won’t drive traffic to your website.
There are five ways that you can use to rank high on Google. Let’s review them:
- Link building
It is a well-known fact that backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors that Google takes into account. Consequently, you should build links to your pages.
Let’s say, you have just released a new landing page that you want to rank for the keyword “create an ad” for your ad maker tool. And one of the most straightforward ways to build topic-related links via stealing backlinks from your competitors.
How to do this?
Use the Keywords Explorer tool from Ahrefs and review top-ranking pages for your target keyword. Pay attention to the “SERP overview” report with the column “Domains”.
As you can see, these top-ranking pages have lots of referring domains. You should review what backlinks each of the referring domains have and try to acquire them using outreach.
- Relevance
Google draws attention to whether you use the same keywords as a search query. Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean that these keywords will help your page rank high right off the bat.
Likely, if your page aligns with search intent, you will have way more chances to rank well.
How does it work in practice?
For instance, your target audience types the inquiry “on-page SEO.” It is clear from the query that people are searching for a detailed guide. People want to know what on-page SEO is.
Search intent behind this query is to get the information about on-page SEO but not to buy the SEO services.
Well, you got the point.
- Freshness of keywords
Take a look at the results for the “best tablet” query.
As you can see, the top pages suggest information that has been recently published. What does it mean?
It means that people prefer to get back to this specific inquiry from time to time. Eventually, this keyword gains its freshness again and again. And freshness is one more ranking factor that search engines consider.
To sum up, targeting keywords with a high “freshness” potential is critically important if you want to rank in the SERP.
- HTTPs
If you get back to 2014, you will recollect another tiny Google ranking factor. It is HTTPs that improve website security.
To find out whether your website uses HTTPs just check out your browser bar. There should be a lock icon.
If there is no lock icon, you should fix this issue.
- Mobile-friendliness
Nowadays, people surf the web using their smartphones more often rather than PC. Hence, mobile optimization plays a crucial role when it comes to driving traffic to your website from mobile devices.
Besides, mobile-friendliness became a ranking factor back in 2015. Therefore, if you want to find out whether your site is mobile-friendly, you should go to Google Search Console and review the “Mobile Usability” report.
Finally, the last question that you might be curious about is – how to get more clicks from search organically?
Let’s find out then!
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A Few Pieces of Advice on Getting More Clicks From Search Organically
Targeting the right keywords and following search intent can help you attract the relevant target audience. But you need to catch more eyeballs on your pages, correct?
How to do this?
By creating compelling title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs. And here is a few pieces of advice on how to do this.
- URL
Your first goal is to make the URL as descriptive as you can. Avoid using multiple keywords and make sure they don’t repeat. Don’t include dates and numbers – it will help you make the URL look evergreen.
- Title tag
Don’t write long title tags. They should be 50-60 characters, not longer. Otherwise, they will be truncated. Make sure your title tag matches the search intent of the particular page. Add uniqueness that will help you hook more users. Avoid clickbait for all costs.
- Meta description
Meta description allows you to cover the subject of the page in more detail (compared to the title tag). Don’t forget about search intent and talk to users (active voice). The length of the meta description should be no longer than 120 characters.
Follow these simple rules and your pages will get more clicks from organic search.
To Conclude
Attracting paid customers from Google is no more a challenge. Especially, if you know how organic search works. By having basic knowledge you will be able to drive sustainable traffic to your website constantly.
You have just got familiar with basic & important information about organic search. Use the tips you got in practice and rank for the target keywords in Google’s SERP.
If you think this post lacks some additional tips and tricks, don’t shy away from sharing your thoughts in the comments.