Nowadays more than 90% of digital marketing in Spain is focused on positioning in the Google search engine. There are two clearly differentiated ways of positioning your website: the first is pay per click (PPC), also known as SEM, sponsored links or Adwords. On the other hand, there is organic positioning, also known as SEO or natural positioning. Both strategies are linked to positioning our website in the top positions of search engines.
If you are interested in getting a natural positioning based on your content and not paying, this article is of interest to you.
what is natural positioning?
We call organic positioning or natural positioning the place in which a website appears among the unpaid search results of Google and other search engines when a user searches for a specific keyword.
Each keyword search has thousands or even millions of possible answers in the form of a web page. To decide which ones to show and how to rank them, Google follows a three-step process:
- Crawling: Google's bots or "spiders" crawl the web for pages and "read" them based on an algorithm to see what kind of information they contain.
- Indexing: once they have detected the existing pages, the bots place them in a kind of index, taking into account their content and relevance for different keywords.
- Publication: when a user enters a search on Google, the search engine shows the results in its index that it considers most relevant, based on a series of algorithms known only to them.
How to achieve a natural positioning of our blog or website
Before starting to write an article for your website or blog like crazy, we should stop for a moment and think about what we are going to write and study the way in which we are going to do it to attract our readers and keep Google happy.
Thus, we present the 7 fundamental rules to improve the SEO positioning of your articles:
- Identify the keywords: Just as when you are going to create a website or blog you must develop a keyword strategy to guide your positioning plan, when you create an article you must develop or take into account this strategy. You can use the Google Trends tool, which allows you to see what people are searching for on Google. If you have a Google Adwords account, you can also use the free Keyword Planner tool, which helps you to find the words or phrases that users search for most according to language and country.
A good rule to follow to speed up your work is to organise the keywords by categories or services and in order of importance. To select the right keywords we have to take into account the competition for that word (the higher the competition, the more complicated it will be to rank for it) and the monthly search traffic.
- Strengthen your content: Your content must be useful, original and creative. Before selling your product or service think about how you can help your buyer persona, then write a friendly article, well worked with examples and tips, and that the tone corresponds to the brand.
At this point it will depend a lot on the length of the post you write, the topic and your style, but you should keep in mind some basic rules:
Your article should contain: a main title containing the keyword, subtitles and that at least the keyword appears in one of them and ideally it should have a length of more than 1,000 words, since several studies have shown that more elaborate articles tend to have better SEO results.
- Take care of your images: Your entire website should be SEO friendly, including images. When naming your photos, make sure you name the file correctly.
The idea is that Google can tell what the image is about by the keyword you add to the photo, as it is the main subject of the image. Make sure you add alt text that includes the SEO keyword for that page and is relevant to the image.
Images are becoming more and more important for SEO, so you should always use them with a title and alt attribute, optimising it with the selected keywords.
- Keepin mind the details: To be successful in your SEO strategy the details are important because little by little they add points with Google. The truth is that a website must have certain specific configurations to carry out the positioning in web search engines. Some details that you must take into account:
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- The meta-description: this is the text that appears in the search results (SERP). When writing the meta-description of your pages, try to include your keywords and a call to action. Remember that it should not exceed 155 characters.
- Customise your links: be sure to customise your URLs according to the content of each page of your website and include your keywords. Be careful to remove accents and full stops or commas within your URL as this will affect SEO.
- Create your favicon: the "favourite icon" is the small image that appears in the address bar, favourites and bookmarks of your browser .
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- Fix broken links: It has probably happened to many of us that we suddenly get a sign that says "error 404". These are broken links that can damage your SEO efforts. When your visitors discover that they have broken links, they will not want to continue browsing other pages, and if your visitors spend less time on your site, search engines will assume that you are not providing a good user experience and will lower your web positioning
With regard to links, it is also important to link your content to other internal links, i.e. when you talk about a topic on your website, make sure you can link to another topic and add an internal link to prolong the time users spend on the page.
- Analyse and measure your SEO strategy: To achieve a good organic search engine ranking, it is important to first analyse the performance of your SEO strategy in order to optimise your resources. Some of the tools that will allow you to break down this information are: Search Console, Check My Links or SEO Report Card.
If you want to know more free tools to analyse your SEO strategy click here .
- He who perseveres, gets it: An SEO strategy requires a lot of patience and dedication. Invest the necessary time to create and customise a good website. In order not to lose the rhythm it is essential that you organise yourself, so develop a plan of monthly objectives with the different SEO tactics that you are going to implement in order to have a better control of your actions and to be able to evaluate them.
It is very important that you understand that the search engine optimisation process is not a one-day task. It is necessary to update it and look for ways to optimise it on a daily basis, so that your website is located among the first positions in the search results.
The advantages of natural positioning
Organic or paid positioning, which is more profitable? Well, positioning your website in a natural and organic way is not achieved in four days, but requires patience, perseverance and a lot of work, unlike paid positioning, which achieves more immediate results.
But it is a job that is undoubtedly worthwhile because it has the following advantages:
- Visitors achieved with natural positioning can be more numerous, stable and loyal than those who land on our site through an advertisement.
- Organic positioning achieves much more prestige and credibility with users (and potential customers) than paid advertisements.
- With this type of positioning you save costs, making it possible to create your own promotion channel that does not require constant advertising.
- The positions achieved are maintained over time, as they do not depend on the contracting of an advertisement.
The Internet speaks of your company. Search engines like Google are the showcase for your products and services. All the efforts you can put into improving your web positioning will be the greatest allies for your business. Understanding and improving SEO is not something complex and inaccessible. Even a website without any SEO optimisation can also achieve an excellent natural positioning, as long as it has a good strategy. But it is important to take into account the advantages it offers us when it comes to improving our visualisation in Google.
