Organic SEO for businesses
SEO guide
The term digital marketing includes a vast world of information, unclear terms, data, and numbers that are not always clear to the business owner. One of the fields considered most obscure is SEO (organic optimization of various websites in Google search results). We all know that appearing on Google’s first page for terms relevant to the business = clicks and visits from potential customers looking for your product/service for free. But not all of us know how to reach the first page.
True, it is not easy to reach the first page and even harder to stay there, especially when it comes to competitive keywords. Therefore, we decided to address several recurring questions in the field of organic SEO on Google.
One of the most important things to understand regarding the duration of work required in organic SEO on Google is that this is a time-consuming process (unlike paid advertising). As a rule of thumb, in most cases, you can expect to reach the first page within a period of 3-6 months.
This, of course, depends heavily on the competitiveness of the keywords you are promoting and the strength of your website compared to your competitors’ sites.
Promoting competitive keywords may take longer, sometimes even more than a year to reach Google’s first page, and with the help of professional organic SEO
results can be achieved.
So how do you know if your SEO specialist is doing a good job with organic SEO on Google?
It all starts and ends with goals and metrics.
What is the organic SEO process supposed to give you?
- Increasing visibility and branding by appearing for relevant keywords that your potential customers search for on Google
- Increasing user trust – a website ranking in Google’s top organic search results gains more trust from users.
- Increasing organic visitor traffic to your website (free clicks)
- Increasing the number of inquiries and sales on the site as a result of organic activity
- Increasing the number of inquiries and sales on the site as a result of creating relevant website audiences in remarketing campaigns.
Step one: Define goals
You can take this as a rule of thumb for life: if you want to manage a project professionally, you first need to understand what your goals are, and what you can realistically expect to happen during the optimization work.
Therefore, in the first stage, it is advisable to define goals. SEO goals will usually be related to processes we can measure and to the campaign’s objectives.
We divide the results of the activity into 3 stages:
- First goal: Promoting selected keywords to the first page
- Second goal: Increasing organic visitor traffic to the site as a result of increased presence and keywords reaching Google’s first page
- Third goal: Increasing the number of organic inquiries and sales on the site as a result of increased visits from relevant users via organic search.
Step two: Define metrics
The metric is, of course, the part that needs to be measurable – KPI. Therefore, metrics should be defined quantitatively and bound by time (time until goal completion). Of course, it is also advisable to set realistic goals that are not detached from reality, such as setting a goal for a new fashion website to generate sales from organic activity after just 3 months. Setting such a metric would usually be unrealistic and even deceptive.
Your metrics should align with the goals you defined.
Therefore, if we take the first goal – promoting selected keywords to the first page, we will want to define together with the SEO specialist which keywords we want to promote on the site and within what timeframe we estimate we will be able to see some of them ranking on Google’s first page.
For example, you can define a metric such as: promoting 30% of the selected keywords to the first page within 6 months.
In such a case, the metric is clear, measurable (you can actually see which keywords were promoted to the first page), time-bound, and most importantly, sensible.
Tip: This is the stage to check things through keyword and competitor research.
This is a super important and critical process. The wrong choice of keywords will lead to a huge waste of money and failure to achieve goals due to selecting overly competitive keywords or keywords that attract an irrelevant audience.
Moving on to the second goal – Increasing visitor traffic via organic website SEO
After your SEO specialist conducts keyword research and analyzes the competitors, they will already be able to estimate which keywords will be worth promoting and roughly how much time will be needed to reach the first page.
The more keywords reach Google’s first page, the more the volume of users entering the site organically will grow. What is great about this process is that although during organic website promotion you will usually select and focus on 20-30 keywords at most, the byproduct of promoting these keywords is ranking and appearing for dozens of additional long-tail keywords (longer, less competitive keywords promoted within the website’s various content pieces).
From the moment pages from your site start appearing in Google’s top search results, that’s when you will begin to reap the rewards, and organic traffic will grow over time. A website promoted organically is expected to consistently see growth in organic visitor traffic to the site.
In terms of estimation and growth rate expectations, it depends heavily on the search volume (monthly search volume) of the keywords promoted to the first page.
And the third goal – the real bonus – organic website leads
This is the goal that will likely take quite a bit of time to achieve.
Assuming you are promoting your website professionally with the help of an SEO guide or a professional SEO specialist, more and more keywords reach Google’s first page, and with them, organic visitor traffic to the site consistently grows – this is the stage where you can also expect a return on investment.
Yes, it sounds strange, but generally speaking, there is no ROI on SEO work during the first six months; the real ROI comes as a result of increasing site traffic and with it, leads. Once visitors who arrive organically (a free click on a Google search result) submit a lead or buy a product – it is an organic sale that didn’t cost you a dime. Of course, in hindsight, you paid quite a bit to whoever got you there. From here, your ability to generate ROI and free sales from the site will grow exponentially.
For more detailed explanations regarding organic SEO for businesses on Google, watch the video that neatly summarizes the topics we discussed.
Article Author
Anidor Hakak, owner and CEO of Hayde Digital Ltd. – an SEO and digital marketing company. Owner of the content company AD Content & Media.
Lecturer for over a decade on SEO and digital marketing in academia, private colleges, and organizations, and currently developing a SaaS product for the SEO industry.
