What is the easiest way to boost your rank in Google? Improving your organic keywords can cause your search engine placement to soar! It’s the key to getting free website traffic day after day.
Just imagine waking up in the morning, getting yourself a cup of coffee, sitting at your laptop and checking the stats on your website. Wouldn’t it be great to see visitors from all over the world checking out your website, visiting page after page, sharing your content and buying your products or services?
The key to making this vision a reality is understanding organic keywords. Choosing the right keywords can be the difference between success and failure.
Here is what we will cover in this article.
What are Organic Keywords?
Let’s start first with a definition of Organic Keywords.
An organic keyword is a keyword used to attract free traffic through search engine optimization (SEO). Organic keywords contrast with pay-per-click (PPC) keywords, which are bid on through paid search marketing campaigns.
Source: https://www.wordstream.com/organic-keyword
The keywords are the words people type into Google when they search for something. Here are some examples:
- blue shoes Florida
- best Korean restaurants near mytown
- is keto diet healthy?
And billions of other searches like these examples that people search for daily…
We can use organic keywords to attract free website traffic. The trick is to ensure we focus articles on keywords people are searching for.
It’s necessary to do keyword research to find out what keywords people are typing into Google. You can use free tools to do keyword research but you will be severely limited in the number of keywords you can look up – typically only 5 per day which is not sufficient to get a good understanding of what keywords you should be targeting.
Your budget should include a keyword research tool to help you find keywords that are low competition and high traffic.
The screenshot below shows you what a keyword research tool looks like. Notice you get information on monthly search volumes, competition and difficulty score for each keyword. Tools typically will suggest related keywords to research.
To read more on the important topic of keyword research check out this article on three affordable keyword research tools.
Or, this in-depth article on my favourite affordable keyword research tool: SE Rankings Review – Affordable SEO tool that’s surprising good.
What is your Organic Rank?
Organic rank is your position in search engine results page based on how relevant and useful Google considers your article. Organic means not paid for, paid ads position is based on how much is paid for the ad, not on it’s relevance or usefulness.
Finding good organic keywords isn’t enough. You need to add those keywords into an article using good SEO techniques and then publish and promote your content in order to rank well.
To get a good organic rank you need the following:
- Good organic keywords (researched using a keyword research tool – not guessing!)
- Well written original content using the organic keywords you’ve researched
- Use SEO techniques to maximize your chances of ranking well
- promote content on social media, newsletter or other ways
So organic ranking requires a lot of skill and dedication to be able to perform well consistently. Don’t get discouraged if after publishing content it doesn’t perform well quickly. It can take a while for Google to find, crawl and index your content.
Organic Search Visibility
What are some of the ways you can increase your visibility in search engines?
Add high quality images
An image is worth a thousand words is the famous quote. In fact, it’s worth 60,000 words according to research. Humans process an image 60,000 times faster than written text so make sure you include images with your articles.
2 x
Blog posts that feature an image every 75-100 words get 2X more shares than those without
Source: Blogging Statistics 2023
Images can be linked back to their original website. This increases the number of external links which is an SEO signal.
Also include alt text with the image, this is so screen readers for people who have poor sight can understand what the image is. Search engines also process the alt text so it’s another important SEO signal, especially if you put an organic keyword in the alt text.
Add social media sharing buttons
When a reader gets to the end of your article you want them to share it with their network. Sharing your content boosts the outreach for your article and gets you a backlink.
Why not make it easy for them to share your content? That’s where social media sharing buttons come in. Make sure you add them to every page you write.
These buttons will normally be part of your theme on your website. If you theme doesn’t support social media sharing buttons then you need to get a different theme!
Here is a review of a fast, lightweight theme for WordPress that supports social media sharing buttons: GeneratePress review: Fast WordPress theme in free and premium versions (this is the theme I use on this website).
Create an awesome headline
Your headline is important. People decide to read your content based on the article so it’s worth spending some time to craft a good one.
Make sure to use a good SEO plugin to help you with your content including the headline. Here is a review of All in One SEO (AIOSEO) for WordPress websites. This SEO plugin will analyze your headline, you can use it to create amazing headlines!
Link to other pages on your website
Internal linking, that is linking to other pages on your website, is good for your readers and for SEO. It keeps visitors on your website and provides other interesting topics your visitors can read about.
Read more on the importance of internal linking.
Add a Table of Contents
Add a table of contents near the top of your article. It provides readers with an overview of the topics you are writing about. Readers can click on a link to go directly to a section they are most interested in.
Table of Contents are also good for SEO. Google sometimes will generate links directly to your sub headings using the table of contents if formatted correctly.
All in One SEO plugin will generate a table of contents for you by analyzing all your sub-headings and compiling them into a table of contents. This article has an AIOSEO compiled table of contents at the top of this page.
Increase Google presence
A quick summary of ways to increase your Google presence:
- Ensure your website is mobile friendly
- Fast website (ideally less than 2 seconds to load a page)
- Frequently updated original content
- Good formatting (headers, sub-headers, bullet points, images, 2-3 sentence paragraphs)
- Low competition keywords
- Promote on social media
Keep learning SEO skills so you can improve your content.
Learn copywriting so you can write more informative and compelling articles.
Google Organic Listing
An organic listing is a listing that appears on the Google search website that is not paid for. It is listed because Google thinks it is good answer to the user’s query.
Organic listings have a higher credibility with users because they are not paid for. Anyone can appear at the top of the first page of Google if they are willing to pay enough money to Google.
Learning to generate content that ranks well organically on Google will pay off by saving money on advertising. Small business owners can’t compete with large businesses by advertising as their marketing budget will be smaller.
As a small business owner targeting low competition keywords you can outrank much larger companies if you learn to do keyword research, SEO and content writing well.
How to know SEO is working
You need to track your organic ranking positions using a rank tracking tool.
Type your organic keywords into the tool and it will track your positions on Google and other search engines for you. These tools can be expensive so you may want to choose a mid-tier tool to begin with. Some tools will reduce the frequency of checking your keyword rankings from daily to 3-day or weekly to reduce the cost for you.
A good mid-tier keyword research tool I can recommend is SE Ranking. You can reduce the position tracking updates to weekly to get a reduced price. For new websites there is no need to check your ranking position daily. A 14 day free trial is available here.
Final Thoughts
So, in summary:
- Organic keywords – keywords used to attract free traffic
- Organic rank – position in search engine results page based on merit, not payment
- Organic search visibility – use images, good headlines, social media buttons and table of contents
- Increase Google presence – high quality original content with well researched low competition keywords
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