Organic SEO from Embryo

In basic terms, local SEO is the process of optimising your online presence to increase local business and improve your profits through local traffic. For example, if you search for a supermarket and its opening times, the search should bring up the closest supermarket in your area – this is local SEO in action. It’s a really important way for companies to communicate with their customers and bring in targeted traffic – what’s more, the evidence shows just how effective local SEO really is.

According to Google:

• 30% of all mobile searches are linked to location
• 28% of local searches result in something being purchased
• 78% of people who search for a location visit the physical location within 24 hours

Another important aspect of local SEO is the concept of reviews. With the blossoming of the internet age, online reviews have become more and more popular, with many people seeking out places such as Tripadvisor, Trustpilot or Google Reviews before deciding to visit a location.

If you have a Google Business Profile (something that is recommended for most businesses), then the reviews section should be activated, allowing customers to leave positive (hopefully!) reviews and provide feedback – which you can act on if needed.

Good ranking factors for local SEO include using online citations and mentions of your business in online business directories, using online reviews to your benefit, using tools such as Google My Business to assess the data surrounding your business and how to improve it, and general SEO tips, like making your website mobile friendly and the use of keywords.

By utilising local SEO correctly, you can ensure that your business is one of the top rankings for the local area – perhaps even the first, depending on what you are selling and how many similar businesses there are nearby.

Whilst there are some similarities between local SEO and organic SEO, they’re also rather different beasts, and most businesses will want to implement elements of both SEO options to optimise their websites to the best of their ability.

Simply put, local SEO focuses on organic searches based on your local area, bringing up relevant businesses and organisations within a certain radius, with those closest to your location being prioritised.

However, whilst organic SEO uses some of the same techniques as local SEO, it’s not location-specific, making it more generic to match a broader demographic. Things such as online reviews won’t be as important to organic SEO due to this (although they may still appear), as the businesses that appear during an organic search could be located thousands of miles away. The reason businesses tend to rank on the first page, even if they are located a long distance away from you, is purely down to the principles and techniques associated with organic search.

When utilising organic SEO correctly, you’re essentially making your website as user-friendly and searchable as you possibly can – one of the key factors involved with this is making sure it’s as crawlable as possible for the crawler bots that search engines use, which will help your website to rank higher.

To rank highly in organic search, you need to utilise things like keywords and topic clusters. The other key aspect of organic SEO is that, in order to rank highly on Google, your content must be well-researched, authoritative and trustworthy, as these are things that Google considers to be important.

So, in simple terms, local SEO uses similar concepts – however, it’s mostly based around local businesses and optimising your website towards local traffic. Organic SEO, on the other hand, lends a lot of its tactics to local SEO, but it’s more general and is not location specific.

With the rise of modern technology and most people now having access to mobile phones, it’s imperative that you optimise your site for mobile devices. How widespread are such devices? Well, in 2019, [there were over 80 million mobile phone subscriptions in the UK](https://www.statista.com/statistics/387184/number-of-mobile-phones-per-household-in-the-uk/#:~:text=Mobile in the United Kingdom,population of 66.8 million inhabitants.), despite the population being less than 70 million at the time. Depending on what sort of business you are trying to market, it might be worth creating an app for people to access it, which can be easily downloadable onto mobile phones and tablets.

Whether you create an app or not, you still need to optimise your site for mobile use. As mobiles and tablets typically have smaller screens than PCs, part of your optimisation will be making the desktop version of your site mobile compatible. If you don’t optimise your site for mobile use, you may lose visitors and your search engine rankings could drop. Google themselves have some tips on how to do this, and it’s worth pointing out that 58% of people access websites via their mobile devices, showing just how imperative mobile optimisation is.

Google revealed a mobile-first index in 2018, which ranks sites based on how well their mobile site is optimised. Sometimes people try to reduce the content on their mobile site when compared to the normal website, but this is not a good idea. The content should remain the same, as stated by Google, but in a trimmer format.

If your website is already well optimised for computers, then that’s half the battle done already. The main issue that occurs is usually due to performance, so site speed needs to be improved across the board, with a focus being put firmly on the user experience.

Local search is also very important when focusing on mobile devices, as people tend to use their mobiles when they’re out and about. Interestingly, 76% of people making a local search visit the business location within 24 hours, so local SEO should be instigated on both mobile and desktop devices.

‘People Also Ask’ (PAA) is a feature that you might not be aware of – it’s a box featured on SERPs, with Ahrefs finding that 43% of new enquiries now show one of these boxes. The basic premise of PAA is that it answers a set of questions that users are likely to ask when searching for a specific thing, with the information coming from a specific web page or site. Whilst PAA boxes won’t feature for every search and can vary in terms of queries, it can’t hurt to use them, as any tool you can utilise within your SEO strategy is bound to impact your overall search rankings.

In order to be eligible to rank in Google’s PAA tool, you need to optimise your site with reader intent in mind. By using content that meets the E-A-T principles laid out further up this page, you’ll double your chances.

Another tip is to write content that is question-based, fitting the Q&A format of the PAA. Questions are generally considered to be a good SEO tactic anyway, as they facilitate the likelihood of useful content being included on your site.

There are quite a few other search engines that manage to co-exist alongside Google, with Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com and DuckDuckGo being some of the more popular ones – saying this, their popularity pales entirely in comparison to Google.

Most tactics used with organic SEO will also work on other search engines, even when optimised for Google. However, Google should always be your main focus. As an example of its wide adoption, Google dropped for five minutes back in 2013, resulting in global web traffic plummeting by 40%, showing just how massive Google really is.

Different platforms and browsers use different search engines as their default search engine – this can obviously be changed later, but many people will continue to use the search engine that their device came with, which can add up to quite a bit of traffic.

One thing to note is that many organisations and digital marketing agencies tend to focus their organic SEO solely on Google, leaving a bit of a gap in the market for the use of other search engines. Other search engines may bring up content within their searches that isn’t immediately available when searching for the same thing on Google, so there is a niche to be carved out by using other search engines if you know what you’re doing.

The Google Chrome browser obviously uses Google as its default – however, Mozilla’s Firefox browser uses Google as a default in many regions. In some areas, other browsers such as Baidu (China) or Yandex (Russia) are used. Google is banned in China completely, and whilst the platform is still available in Russia, it’s subject to mass censorship. Therefore, it’s wise to factor in the location of your target audience when deciding on which search engine to concentrate your efforts.

Whilst savvy people can potentially get around the Google ban in these areas by using a proxy and other similar programs, many people choose to use the standard browser in their nation, so if you want your business to reach people in these countries, then different SEO tactics will be needed.

Paid ad sales were recently banned in Russia, so organic SEO definitely seems to be the way forward there. DuckDuckGo is a search engine with a twist, focusing purely on privacy and encryption. It’s the default search engine when using the Tor browser to access the deep web – however, this isn’t something a normal business would normally want to advertise on, due to its shady reputation and small audience share.

Understanding what makes Google stand heads and shoulders above the rest of its competitors is key to developing good SEO for it. Reputation is a huge factor that pushes people to use Google without even trying other search engines, due to the familiarity that comes with using something you know (which is also an example of how organic SEO should work, by driving repeat traffic to your website).

Google was also one of the first search engines in existence, being officially launched way back in 1998, so many people will have grown up using it, adding to that familiarity factor. Google is also a lot faster than its competitors and has a greater deal of choice, due to having virtually millions more users within its index, as well as an algorithm that produces more relevant results.

Innovation is also key – until relatively recently, Yahoo used to give the top search results to those businesses that paid the most, which often resulted in inaccurate results at the top. Instead of following a similar path to Yahoo, Google decided to create a unique algorithm that focused on relevance to the search, the number of links on the site, and the overall quality of the page. Paid ads therefore only take up a portion of the SERP, which has allowed them to earn money whilst still providing a reliable and trustworthy service for its users.

From these examples, we can clearly see why Google is the top search engine, and part of that is due to its algorithms and the way they use organic SEO to rank websites, using a combination of both SEO & paid ads.

This is a commonly asked question and one that will usually depend on whether you’re utilising local SEO to its full potential. Whilst organic searches and SEO aren’t typically used for local SEO, you may find that local search is naturally enhanced by the use of organic SEO, if you’re using it well.

Organic SEO is a more general term, applicable to the process of improving web page rankings within search engines through the use of authoritative and expert content. Local SEO is slightly different – whilst some of the same tactics are used, local SEO tends to be based around local businesses, whereas organic SEO can be based around any business or web page, whether it’s local or the organisation is located hundreds of miles away.

Different processes are used for local SEO – for example, reviews may be left on Google Reviews (which can be managed via Google My Business), whereas with organic SEO, you may use keywords, topic clusters and long-form content in order to increase your rankings within a search engine. However, using organic SEO tactics should help increase your local SEO somewhat if you’re using it correctly.

Keywords and topic clusters can also be particularly useful for local SEO, especially if your business is one of several similar businesses in the area, competing against each other. If someone makes a local search for a business in the local area, they’re more likely to go for the one at the top of the search engine page.

By using organic SEO processes, you can ensure that your business will be listed at (or near) the top of the search results, which will make it more likely that people will seek your business out, particularly if you work in a competitive local industry. By combining local SEO and organic SEO, you can ensure that your business and its associated web pages are at the top of their game, securing you as much traffic as is humanly possible.

In short, absolutely! SEO is one of the – if not the – most important aspect when trying to bring in as much traffic and as much profit as possible.

That said, with other tactics such as PPC and paid social ads emerging in recent years, many people have now moved across to those options instead of focusing on SEO. One of the most common things we tend to see is companies either neglecting their SEO in preference to other types of digital marketing, or abandoning it entirely. It’s not uncommon to see a business investing huge sums of money in PPC, with a much smaller budget being allocated to SEO.

It’s good to use a range of different marketing strategies so you can get the most traffic from a good range of sources, but neglecting SEO is a major mistake that many companies make. The explanation for people over-investing in PPC is that it tends to give you faster results, equating to large amounts of money being generated in a short space of time.

Most marketers tend to agree that SEO is the most important form of digital marketing out there, and for good reason. With PPC and paid social ads, you have to keep investing money to keep the program running, whereas once your content is written and it’s SEO optimised, you don’t have to pay any more money for it, yet it will keep working.

The statistics also show that SEO is extremely relevant still – over 75% of clicks happen on the first page of Google and most people don’t scroll past the first page. What’s more is that the majority of Google users only ever click on the first five sites listed on page one – optimising your content using SEO is the only way you can be listed that highly on the search engine, showing just how relevant SEO currently is.

Everything you’ve read so far on this page has hopefully demonstrated, at least partly, that SEO is incredibly important for marketing your business. At Embryo, we believe that SEO is imperative to online success, particularly with the rise of technology and the internet dominating the current marketing industry, like most other things. But if you’re not quite sure about SEO and need a little more proof, then this section is for you.

Firstly, the statistics speak for themselves. If your website has a high ranking or is listed on the first page of Google, you have a much higher chance of people visiting your website and engaging with your company. Evidence shows that the first page of Google accounts for over 71% of clicks – whilst this number can fluctuate at times, it’s usually very high. A whopping 85% of organic clicks result in the user remaining on the site/engaging with the company.

The higher your website ranks in a search engine, the more traffic and clicks it will get, leading to more sales and ultimately profit for your business. So it’s clear from these statistics that SEO (particularly organic SEO) is extremely important in the digital marketing world.

Whilst other digital marketing services (e.g., PPC & paid social media ads) can be useful, SEO accounts for more clicks, sales and traffic than any other online marketing format. This shows that, even if you do use other forms of digital marketing (it’s always a good idea not to keep all your eggs in one basket), SEO needs to be a priority. You also don’t need to necessarily pay to keep SEO running on your website, as once the content is up there, you can keep it there for life.

However, with other digital marketing options like paid social media ads and PPC, you have to pay money to actively keep your campaigns going, which can end up being rather costly in the end. SEO should be cheaper, so if you’re just starting out or find yourself strapped for cash, then SEO could be a game changer for you.

So as you can see, SEO is fundamental in the digital marketing game, particularly if your website is ranked within the first five links on the first page of Google. It’s important to note that good content and white hat SEO are the basis of what you should be aiming for, as bad content and black hat SEO will not help you with your marketing goals, particularly with the new update Google has rolled out recently.