The Pros and Cons of Organic SEO

Organic SEO is one of the most effective ways to attract new customers to your website, but as with all tactics, it has both advantages and disadvantages. SEO analysts work hard to monitor updates, whilst creative teams work hard to craft unique content.

This post is going to explain to you the pros and cons of organic SEO, and explain how you can use it to your advantage whilst improving your rank in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Page).

If you’re just starting out in the world of SEO, let us explain a few things to you before we begin.

What is organic SEO?

Organic SEO is the method of improving your websites position for specific keywords or search terms within Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Improving your SEO means that your website is more likely to be found by Internet users and customers compared to your competition. There are a lot of abbreviations and technical terms in the SEO industry, we’ve tried to list the most commonly used ones in a recent blog post to give you a helping hand.

Why do you need organic SEO?

A business needs organic SEO as it gives them a wider range of brand reach and domain authority in search engines. It means your website is more likely to be found in local and international search, and has the added benefit of increased exposure for brands and companies alike.

It can be an incredibly effective way of getting new customers to your website.

If you want to learn a little bit more, you might find out our blog on SEO tips and tricks for beginners useful.

Advantages of Organic SEO

Cost effective

Organic SEO is much more cost effective than pure PPC advertising in the long term. However, each does have it’s place within the SEO world, and for companies just starting out, both can be ideal ways to increase brand awareness and gain maximum exposure on the Internet.

What’s the best approach to take?

It can be hard to strike a balance between organic SEO and paid advertising, but we usually suggest a combination of the two. Organic SEO helps with achieving higher rankings, whilst paid advertising takes your brand straight into the consumers eye-line.

However, if web users organically find your website, and see that the content you’ve created is of the highest quality, they’re more likely to remember you in the future. This helps to increase company exposure and brand awareness.

Push your competitors down

Now we don’t mean that this is an all-out war with your competitors, but the more pages that you have ranking highly in search engines, the less likely your competitors are to appear on the same page as you.

When you’re planning your website, or repurposing your content, you need to do your keyword research properly. Tools such as Google Analytics and Google Keyword Planner will give you insight and statistics on what keywords customers are searching for when finding your site.

Near constant promotion

New York might be the city that never sleeps, but the Internet never stops either. When you’re ranking highly on search engine results, you’ll be receiving 24/7 promotion for your website.

Disadvantages of Organic SEO

Time

Slow and steady wins the race, and the same is true for ranking via Organic SEO. You might not see results for weeks, even months, and it does take time to create content that is engaging and unique enough to rank highly in search engines.

Search Engines are in no rush to put you on the top of their result pages, so don’t give up if you aren’t ranking #1 within the first week of starting your SEO! Search Engines such as Google will need time to crawl your site and decide for itself which search terms it thinks are most relevant for your site.

However, if you are looking for search engine traffic straight away, there is an alternative. PPC (or Pay-per-Click) advertising is commonly used by businesses on a worldwide basis. As we’ve already explained, a careful balance between PPC and organic SEO is the ideal way to improve your rankings.

If you’re still unsure about PPC, or how you could benefit from it, then take a look at our recent post on the pros and cons of PPC.

Fluctuating results

With organic SEO, the results can often fluctuate dependent on season, user trends or socio-economic events. For example, the impressions received by a greetings card website may increase over the Christmas or Valentines periods, and decrease throughout the summer holidays.

One of the ways to counteract these fluctuations is to create unique content that is evergreen, and take into account the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). As Search Engine Journal explains, LSI is “a mathematical method used to determine the relationship between terms and concepts in content”.

For example, if you’re writing a blog post on digital marketing, LSI terms might include “digital advertising trends”, “trends in marketing”, “advice on digital marketing” and so on.

Unknown updates

Unfortunately, as one of the largest search engines, the Big-G (Google in-case you hadn’t guessed) can be quite secretive when it comes to rolling out updates within the SEO world.

Some of the ‘algorithm updates’ will be released with little or no warning, and this causes absolute havoc for SEO analysts. More often than not these updates will have animal names, for example, Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird are some of the biggest updates to happen in the past few years.

Whenever an update is released, campaigns that SEO analysts have worked on for months and even years can come crumbling down overnight. This can be a painful experience, but solid content and white-hat SEO methods can help to protect your work.

Round Up

There we go, the pros and cons of organic SEO. What do you think? It’s a large and ever-changing world out there, but with the right tools in place, you’ll soon be on your way to page one of Google.

Time to get out there, choose the most appropriate keywords, create unique and engaging copy, and promote your content to your social media following!

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If you think it’s time that your website took that next step up in search engine rankings, then we can help. Get in touch with a member of our team here, and we’ll be happy to talk through how we can help with your own SEO.