Organic Search Engine Optimization Services and Strategies
When brands come to us screaming, “Paid ads aren’t working!”, we have a few things to say. Here’s one of the first: Come meet our organic search engine optimization services. To generate high-quality online visibility and drive qualified traffic, organic search optimization is essential.
- Website traffic isn’t the goal – highly targeted traffic is. Organic rankings attract potential buyers already searching for a product like yours.
- Ranking well for branded and category keywords builds trust with savvy consumers who are increasingly skeptical of paid ads.
- Known as a cost-effective alternative to paid ads, few people realize that organic search success also supports paid search results. Let us explain…
What is Organic Search Optimization?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, the process of attracting targeted website traffic via unpaid search engine results pages (SERPs).
Unlike paid media campaigns, organic SEO services deliver long-term performance benefits, including:
Sustainability
Grow with qualified traffic that keeps coming (we’re talking months and years!) without the ongoing costs of pricey paid campaigns.
Credibility
Search users often develop “ad blindness” and focus more on the top organic results that are perceived as more credible and relevant.
Engagement
Studies show that organic informational queries and searches with commercial intent receive higher click-through rates than paid ads.
Higher ROI
After the initial investment, ongoing costs associated with organic search are still lower than paid media. Your budget will love you.
Data-Driven Insights
Successful organic search optimizations provide precise keyword and content insights that support all other marketing channels.
Client-Partner Case Study
Apiary provided SEO strategy to support the site redesign and rebrand after Arxan’s acquisition of Apperian Inc. After launch, it was time to ramp up paid acquisitions, so we focused primarily on LinkedIn Ads to hone in on high quality prospects, resulting in a 77% reduction in CPL.
“By working with Apiary, our rankings rebounded quickly after the migration, resuming the volume of leads and deals. Very happy with the results.” – Tiffany Early, Senior Marketing Director, Arxan Technologies
The Additional Benefits of Foundational Optimizations
Contrary to popular opinion, the first and most important user of your website is not existing or future customers – it’s Google and other search engines.
Understanding and implementing the exact changes Google wants to see on your website is no longer optional – that’s performance marketing 101.
We refer to the most essential, Google-friendly organic search optimizations as “foundational optimizations.” As the name suggests, these are the solid baseline improvements that produce quick performance wins on organic search performance, while also driving performance on other channels like paid media, email, and social media.
Here’s why investing in organic SEO services produces additional benefits beyond the search universe:
- Google and other search engines suppress paid ad traffic (yes, even though you’re paying for it!) to websites lacking the foundational optimizations that emerge from the most effective organic search strategies.
If paid campaigns are part of your holistic marketing strategy, those campaigns are doomed to underperform if you’re ignoring organic search.
- Most organic search optimization strategies include the creation of targeted landing pages that feature segment-specific content and a streamlined user experience. These high-quality pages often lead to higher conversions when incorporated into paid social, organic social, and email campaigns.
- The keyword analysis associated with organic search engine optimizations clarifies what terms best correlate with purchase intent, which can then enhance your overall content strategy across online and offline channels.
- Beyond keywords, organic search optimizations also reveal what types of content resonate most with your target audience, which should again be translated into broader content marketing efforts across all channels.
Our Approach to Organic Search Engine Optimization
Generic recommendations for all clients is antithetical to sustainable growth. Our customized strategies always include:
Performance Audits
- Content: Evaluating content’s relevance and quality, and alignment with user intent.
- UX: Assessing your site’s ease of use, functionality standards, and how/if it meets the user’s needs and expectations.
- CTAs: Examining the placement, frequency, variety, and design strengths and weaknesses of existing call-to-action elements.
- Keyword Mapping: Analyzing the alignment between targeted keywords on individual pages, and identifying initial gaps.
- Audience Identification: Developing a deeper understanding of the target audience’s preferences and conversion needs.
- Intent Analysis: Reviewing search queries to determine searcher intent and assessing how existing content aligns or doesn’t.
- Technical: Reviewing technical aspects such as Core Web Vitals, page load speed, indexing issues, redirect mapping, backlink profiles, schema markup, and sitemap validation to gauge website performance and search engine accessibility.
On-Page Optimizations
- Keyword Research: Evaluating ranking opportunities by considering relevance, competitiveness, and search volume.
- Content Optimizations: Enhancing site content quality, structure, and keyword integration to maximize search visibility.
- Foundational Optimizations including:
- URL
- Page title
- Meta description
- H1 and other significant tags
- Image alt text
Off-Page Optimizations
- Link building: Strategically acquiring high-quality backlinks from external websites with high domain authority to increase visibility, credibility, and search rankings.
- Social media signals: Increasing social media engagement, which is part of how search engines determine a website’s popularity, authority, and subsequently, search engine rankings.
- PR and influencer collaborations: Facilitating strategic partnerships with public relations professionals and influencers to generate brand mentions, backlinks, and positive publicity.
Categorical Prioritization of Organic Search Optimization Opportunities + Roadmap to Complete
Identifying organic search optimization opportunities is an important first step, but sporadically implementing those optimizations before conducting a prioritization exercise is all kinds of inefficient.
Every search optimization tactic should be strategically plotted within a hierarchy of impact to align with available marketplace opportunities, overall business objectives, budget, timeline, and any other constraints.
What is the SEO impact of each optimization?
Marketing leaders are facing increasing pressure to justify their marketing investments. Transparent reporting and daily performance checks allow us to use data to confirm the direct link between each optimization and ranking improvements.
What is the bottom-line business impact of each optimization?
Pressure from the C-suite extends further into questioning the relationship between marketing and the acquisition moment. We use marketing math to show how organic optimizations grow the bottom line. No more ROI guesswork – just math.
Analyzing The Competitive Landscape
Our competitor analysis framework has been called “intense” and that descriptor is just fine by us. Considering the ambitious goals our client-partners come to us with, we think it should be.
Competitor analysis reveals insights into what is already proven to engage your target audience, and also highlights wide open lanes of untapped opportunities.
Our process is customized for each brand’s unique context, and includes:
Keyword Gap Analysis- Content Gap Analysis
- Traffic Performance
- Keyword Ranking Analysis
- Best Practices and Site Architecture Comparisons
Data-Driven Optimization Recommendations
Our experienced marketing technologists are power users of every established analytics platform and SEO performance tool.
Performance Benchmarking and Reporting
Meticulous metrics tracking delivered via straightforward reports that remove confusion, instead of fostering it.
Customize dashboards to visualize data insights
Compare against historical and competitive benchmarks
Employ data-driven evaluation tools to assess performance impact
Organic SEO Services Offered
SEO Strategy
Enterprise SEO: Tailored for complex corporate sites with a high volume of pages.
Local SEO: Optimized for geographical relevance and local search results.
B2B SEO: Focused on generating leads with business-to-business audiences.
eCommerce: Customized for product visibility and strong UX to support shorter sales cycles.
Keyword Research and Strategy
Keyword research is the beating heart of every SEO strategy. Our strategists analyze search volume, category opportunities, and competitor behavior to identify high-potential keywords, which drive content refinements and net new content creation to improve your place in search rankings.
SEO Reporting
Our human-speak reporting approach translates comprehensive tracking and metrics analysis (organic traffic, keyword rankings, backlinks, conversion rates, etc.) into useful insights that support data-driven decision-making for ongoing organic search engine optimization strategies.
Content Services
Any ol’ content just won’t do. To be a category leader with multiple site pages ranking in the top search results for branded and unbranded key terms, brands must:
- Consistently publish high-quality, SEO-friendly content that drives visibility and engagement
- Develop an appropriate set of content collections to align with the various types of search intent within each stakeholder segment.
- Leverage a range of content formats, including blog posts, landing pages, case studies, and multimedia content.
Our Walk Matches Our Talk. Proven Results.
Outranked
Sephora
within 30 days
13 Top 3
rankings
within 30 days
19 Page 1
rankings
within 30 days
#1 ranking for
“App Security”
a high-value search term
25% improvement
(5+ positions each)
in product ratings
345%
growth
in QoQ lead volume
2X
revenue
58% improvement
in Page 1 rankings
within 4 months
98% MoM
improvement
in organic revenue
2X
revenue
160%
increase
in SEM ROAS
97%
increase
in revenue from SEO
“The team at Apiary is exceptionally professional, they hit their deadlines, and have worked closely with the team at Intrepid to hit targets each month. Our business tends to have a lot of changes and Apiary can smoothly pivot alongside us. We’re blown away by the results.”
Maya Thomas, Digital Marketing Manager, Intrepid Travel
Why Choose Apiary for Organic Search Optimization?
Our consultant-partners are hands-on-keyboard marketing experts, each with an average of 12 years’ experience.
- Holistic organic search strategy vs disjointed optimizations
- Strong track record across Tech, eCommerce, Retail, Legal, Hospitality, etc.
- Headquartered in the Cloud – active across 7 time zones
- Organizational culture defined by velocity and responsiveness
- Resourcing model lets client-partners flex up/down as needed
- Dogged about data. Agnostic about platforms and tools.
Let’s get you found.
Get started with our Organic Search Engine Optimization Services.
Frequently Asked Questions
About Organic Search Engine Optimization
How important is search engine optimization?
Let us count the ways… Organic search engine optimizations provide:
- Visibility that lets your brand be found in search engine results, where interested users are already active.
- Credibility and trustworthiness associated with organic vs sponsored results.
- Reduced maintenance costs as compared to ongoing paid campaigns.
- Data-driven insights that enhance non-search channels like paid media, email, and organic social.
What is an organic SEO consultant?
An organic SEO consultant is tasked with a brand’s organic search engine optimization management. Typically working in teams of overlapping expertise, the most well-regarded SEO consultants have a verifiable performance history of making strategic, technical, and content optimizations that improve the ranking of key website pages in organic search engine results.
Their organic SEO services seek to improve a company’s organic search engine rankings with the ultimate goals of:
- Increasing top of funnel awareness (a leading revenue indicator)
- Turning ready-to-buy users into targeted and qualified website traffic
- Higher rates of customer acquisition and retention.
Is search engine optimization worth it?
Considering that optimizing your site for organic search brings organic and highly relevant traffic, while also optimizing your site to support paid search and all other marketing channels, we’d say… Absolutely, search engine optimization is entirely worth it.
Data-driven SEO consultants, like the ones you’ll find here at Apiary, use marketing math to clearly demonstrate the ROI of each performance investment.
Across multiple industries and verticals, investing in organic SEO services is consistently one of the highest drivers of marketing ROI when compared to all other marketing investments.
How to improve organic search?
We admire the confidence of the lone-wolf SEO consultant who says they can do it all. However, comprehensive and lasting organic search improvements require a team of SEO specialists providing:
- Competitive market assessments
- Holistic keyword research strategy based on search volume, keyword difficulty and keyword gap analysis.
- On-page SEO
- Improving or developing high-quality content, curated for a variety of user intents
- Technical SEO addressing site speed and other performance indicators
- Off-page SEO, including backlink building, optimizing social media profiles, online reputation management, content syndication and distribution
- UX (User Experience) optimizations
- Performance monitoring, analysis, and reporting.
How to improve organic search keyword ranking?
- Selecting SEO keywords and putting those keywords in the optimal locations are not the same thing. Improving organic search keyword ranking requires consistently publishing high-quality content that naturally integrates data-driven keywords where search engine crawlers are looking for them – URLs, page titles, H1 tags, meta descriptions, and body text.
- While content that aligns with user intent is essential for improving organic search rankings, technical adjustments are equally critical. Category leaders ensure their websites are optimized for speed, mobile-friendliness, and follow UX best practices to improve the user experience, while acquiring backlinks from authoritative sources.
- Recognize that organic search engine optimizations are not a one-time activity. Maintaining Top 3 search rankings requires consistently publishing and refreshing high-quality content, regularly auditing and strengthening the technical health of your website, and tracking performance in order to identify further optimization opportunities.
