
Mastering Organic SEO: Proven Strategies and Advanced Tips for Success
93% of internet traffic begins with a search. While this exact number may be debatable, the truth remains: companies should make appearing in searches a top priority to remain relevant. Appearing in search queries without paying for advertising requires website content optimization, or search engine optimization (SEO). In marketing, this is called organic search engine optimization, which is the opposite of paid search engine marketing utilizing Google Ads and other paid media.
Truly mastering organic SEO requires learning more than just the basics. Instead, based on my own experience managing this blog for more than 15 years, helping clients with their SEO as a Fractional CMO, and introducing concepts from my best-selling digital marketing playbook titled Digital Threads, I have created a guide with actionable strategies, advanced techniques, and real-world examples. Using my guide, you can refine your approach, boost your search engine rankings, and more effectively capture the attention of your target audience.
What is Organic SEO? A Brief Overview

Organic search engine optimization is the process of developing high-quality content to improve organic rankings on search engines. What this means is that to achieve organic SEO, you must optimize your website to rank highly in search volume. Doing so organically means doing so without paying for ads or any additional boosts to ensure that your site or company comes up in searches.
Ultimately, organic SEO seeks to improve user experience; in order to rank highly, you must generate high-quality content that utilizes target keywords, and answers user’s questions. This can be done on landing pages, blog posts, and even press releases, in order to make your company or website highly visible to potential customers.
Long-term, organic SEO efforts are essential to make sure that you are continually coming up high in search rankings. Internet searchers rarely go past the first page or two of search results, and conversion rates are far lower in pages that do not make the cut of that first page. Content creation with relevant keywords in mind will more effectively place your site at the forefront of potential customers’ minds.
Paid search marketing is certainly one way to get your brand noticed and can help you stand out in relevant searches. That being said, however, there are some significant drawbacks to paid search; namely, paid search costs money upfront, results stop the moment you are no longer paying, and paid search does not build your site or improve rank over time. Organic SEO efforts take search intent into account, and can gradually build over time to help your site position itself as an authority. Organic takes longer, certainly, but is less expensive and takes longevity into account.
The Importance of User Intent and Keyword Research
Understanding user intent is critical to organic SEO success. Although it can be tempting to engage in a bit of keyword stuffing for the search terms you know are popular in your niche and call it a day, your goal is not only to see users click on your site; you want users to click on your site and stay a while. If users regularly click on your site and quickly navigate away, search algorithms take notice and gradually decrease the amount of organic search traffic you receive.
What does this mean, exactly? Rather than focusing entirely on appeasing Google Analytics and search queries on the surface, strive to actually answer common questions and fully flesh out common search terms. Long-tail keywords are frequently used in searches, so regularly infusing your content with both short and long-tail keywords will more closely line up with how potential customers search for information on the internet.
Some SEO may require an initial investment; there are paid keyword research tools that can help you identify the search terms most relevant to your site’s pages, as well as free tools. Google Keyword Planner, for instance, offers a free way to look over search results from reputable websites, and determine which keywords are likely to work well for your niche or in your timeframe. Ahrefs is another keyword tool, though this tool starts out at $29/month. It goes in greater depth, however, and offers additional functions like site audits. SEMrush is another in-depth tool that requires payment, starting at $29.99 per month.
Honda provides a great example of the importance of effective keywords. Although most audiences are passably familiar with the car company, Honda found that some audiences were not performing as hoped. In order to address this, Honda revamped their keywords and focused far more attention on both local keywords and large-scale keywords, and saw a 200% increase in traffic!
Further Reading: A Simple Guide to SEO Keyword Research for Newbies
Step-by-Step Guide to Building an Organic SEO Strategy

Building an organic SEO strategy requires some research beforehand. You cannot merely jump on and create valuable content; you must conduct research to determine what content is considered valuable to your audience. Search engine marketing requires ongoing shifts and tweaks, so I have put together a step-by-step guide to build an effective, organic SEO strategy. First up, conduct a technical SEO audit.
Conduct a Technical SEO Audit
Much of what is important in keyword rankings is not easily identified by simply knowing your stuff in your niche. Informational queries will require different information than product recommendation queries, so first take a close look at any sites or platforms you already have, and identify what qualifies as relevant content, what is already working in your favor, and what requires additional help.
Further Reading: Technical SEO: The 15 Technical Aspects of Search Engine Optimization That You Need to Know
Identify Niche-Specific Types of Search Intent
The precise type of searches you are optimizing for will depend on your industry, so exact search engine optimization strategies will vary from industry to industry and niche to niche. That being said, there are types of intent that will be relevant to your industry. Identify those, in order to find the keywords that best apply to your content.
Optimize for On-Page SEO
On-page SEO will differ from the bulk of content you are posting on your pages and platforms. On-page SEO describes back-end items found on your site, including your title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and more. These can often take a backseat, but they provide the basic framework for your site, and can help identify helpful content for your audience. Use both short and long-tail keywords in your on-page SEO information.
Further Reading: On-Page SEO: How to Best Optimize the 4 Main Factors to Increase Search Engine Rankings
Build Backlinks and Improve Domain Authority
Backlinks are links that harken back to another site. These links are important, as they help identify your site as an authority. Essentially, backlinks show search engines that you are backing up your claims with research, or at least selecting support from other sources.
While internal links are important (linking to other pages on your site), backlinks suggest that you are not pulling information from thin air and presenting it as fact, improving your domain authority. Having your site linked also helps with domain authority, so encourage sharing whenever you can, and provide the type of content that can be utilized by others to really shine.
Useful Tools to Build an Organic SEO Strategy
Now that you have the basics of building your own organic SEO strategy, you can move on to finding the best tools for that particular goal. Moz and Yoast are two of the most well-known tools out there, depending on the platform through which you host your site. Both offer evaluations of your SEO strategy and use on your pages, and both offer free versions of their tool to help smaller sites as they establish themselves.
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Visual Aids: Understanding Via Visual Data
Understanding the value of organic traffic can be difficult without a visual aid to illustrate the way that organic traffic can grow and improve over time, with a more gradual and consistent return on investment available for business owners. The graph below illustrates that growth, and indicates how valuable SEO efforts can be over time.

Organic SEO strategies ultimately deliver the same click-through rates and results as paid traffic, but often at a fraction of the cost, and without the timeline associated with searches; remember that when you stop paying for ads, your relevant content drifts away. When organic search strategies are employed, organic SEO efforts are ultimately rewarded. Consider the following:

As this graph illustrates, paid search is certainly effective, but it rarely continues to climb, due to other factors and the lack of authority delivered by a paid-for search result. SEO, done well, establishes and supports trust, which can help keep your traffic high, and maintain a greater relationship between you and your customers or prospective customers.
Understanding how to continually support organic search efforts requires regular checking in with your practices and habits. Sustainable growth occurs over time, and every SEO industry expert will tell you: develop your SEO with an eye on longevity and consistency, rather than immediate results. Consider the following:

Advanced Organic SEO Techniques for 2024
As digital marketing and search engine algorithms continue to grow and evolve, the SEO industry as a whole has grown and evolved. In 2024, there are some additional considerations to take into account when developing your SEO strategy. These considerations include voice search optimization, AI-driven SEO, and Core Web Vitals and their impact. All of these can impact how to design your sites and featured snippets, and all can be informed using the EAT model: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Voice search optimization is a form of SEO that focuses on the spoken word. When we search using voice search, our tone is far more likely to be relaxed and conversational, which can change search terms and how those terms are combined.
AI-driven SEO is a form of SEO that utilizes artificial intelligence to develop a long-term strategy. AI-driven SEO utilizes the benefits of AI to evaluate your SEO efforts, automate tasks and changes, and even identify trends to take advantage of in your content creation and marketing.
Core Web Vitals are three measures used to evaluate how well your site performs. The three measures include interactivity, visual stability, and loading performance. What core web vitals essentially evaluate is your site’s ability to respond to user’s needs, and present a clean, functional face.
Further Reading: What is Organic SEO and 12 Strategies to Use It Wisely
Real-World Case Studies and Examples
Learning With Experts saw a dramatic improvement in the performance of their site after implementing some specialized SEO practices. Needing some help while operating in a niche inundated with competition, Learning with Experts focused on keyword research through competitor ranking, improving site health and structure to increase search traffic, and optimizing pages and creating new blog content. When these strategies were implemented, the company saw almost a 60% jump in traffic and over a 90% increase in revenue. Ultimately, this demonstrates the value of looking at your competitors, focusing on keywords and site structure, and creating relevant content to meet your audience’s needs.
The CBD Supplier is a UK-based company that was struggling to stay afloat; although the company had plenty of loyal customers, search traffic was consistently low, and resulted in a lack of web-based conversions. To combat this, the company began focusing all of their efforts on generating content using low-difficulty keywords and an increased degree of authority. By building backlinks, placing internal links, and regularly posting content, the company established themselves as an authority in their field. Within 12 months of enacting these changes, the company saw an over 500% increase in organic traffic.
Essential SEO Tools for Success
I briefly touched on Google tools and paid tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush above, but did not go into great depth or identify additional tools like Screaming Frog, that can help you achieve positive long-term results. Each of these tools can be considered an essential tool, because they provide plenty of keyword research and help inform your overall SEO strategy.
Google tools are frequently ideal for fledgling companies, as they are free and fairly easy to use. There are some limitations, however, as most Google tools do not offer in-depth analyses or provide a single dashboard from which to manage your SEO strategy and marketing campaigns.
Ahrefs, for instance, offers an entire suite of tools to help evaluate your competitors, identify keywords, and measure your success. SEMrush also has a suite of tools. Screaming Frog is a website crawler, or an SEO tool that focuses its efforts on crawling, or combing through a site to evaluate how effective its SEO strategies are. A combination of tools can be your best bet to achieve a multifaceted and effective SEO strategy.
Further Reading: The 16 Best Free SEO Tools You Need to Know in 2024
How to Optimize Your Organic SEO for Mobile

Although the beginning of digital marketing may have focused on websites and stopped there, a large portion of your new and existing customers will likely be viewing your site and all marketing efforts on a mobile device like a phone or a tablet. Make sure your site is mobile friendly, and consider mobile-first indexing through Google, as doing so makes it far more likely for your mobile site to come up sooner in search results.
Mobile page speed matters, as does user experience and content layout, so make sure that you are looking at your mobile site and evaluating how clean and easy to use your site is. Having too many ads can slow down your site, and user experience is significantly diminished when a site is slow, crawling with ads, or constantly showing pop ups. If content layout is not easy to navigate, your mobile users will also struggle to use your site regularly.
Google’s switch to focusing on mobile-first indexing means that Google’s suite of tools are great for evaluating your mobile site. By using Google indexing, analytics, and search console, you can help make sure that your site is considered an authoritative source, and shows up well in mobile searches.
Concluding Thoughts: The Future of Organic SEO
Mastering the basics of organic SEO requires you to have a blend of foundational skills and strategies and at least a cursory understanding of more advanced SEO techniques. Search engines continue to evolve, and SEO strategies must follow suit to remain relevant and to continue coming up in searches. Using the steps I have outlined above, you can make sure that your content is visible and performing well on both mobile and desktop.
Organic SEO is less about ranking highly immediately, and more about sustaining growth over the long-term in order to achieve a company’s ultimate goals of growth and increase. Using the insights and steps I have laid out above, you can build your strategy and watch your organic search rankings soar.