UA Organic search refers to the free, unpaid results a search engine returns. Advertisers can’t buy their way into these results or influence them directly. These are the results the search engine considers most relevant to a user’s query.
What types of organic search results are there?
On Google, most standard search results look like this:
These are known as “blue link” results.
Years ago, every organic result on Google looked exactly like this. Today there are far more formats, and you’ll regularly see new “types” of results.
Let’s go through a few of them.
Answer boxes
Answer boxes are small blocks that briefly answer a user’s question. They appear above or alongside Google’s organic results, and the snippet is pulled from one of the top-ranking pages.
Video carousels
Video carousels contain videos related to the search query. The entire carousel takes up a single position in the organic results.
Top stories
Top stories blocks show recently published content on a given topic. They typically appear in organic results for news-relevant topics.
People also ask (PAA)
“People also ask” (PAA) blocks show related questions that people commonly search for. The answer to each question is shown as a short excerpt pulled from a relevant page on the web.
Why does organic search matter?
Ranking in organic search for relevant keywords brings free traffic to your site.
Given that you need to create and produce content to rank in organic results in the first place, organic traffic is never truly free. But, as in our own case, it’s often the most cost-effective way to bring quality, targeted traffic to a site.
Organic search also matters a great deal to anyone publishing videos on YouTube, since Google often ranks YouTube videos in its video carousels and answer boxes.
A video ranking in an answer box is also known as a featured video snippet.
In other words, getting your videos to rank on Google can often drive a lot of views.
How to rank higher in organic search results
Higher organic rankings usually translate into more organic traffic to your site.
No one knows exactly how Google ranks web pages, but we do know some of the most important factors involved.
Here are just five of them:
- Backlinks
- Relevance
- HTTPS
- Mobile-friendliness
- Freshness
Backlinks
One way search engines determine which sites are “better” is by analyzing backlinks. If an article has a large number of backlinks, people are more likely to consider it genuinely good. New content, on the other hand, likely has no backlinks yet, so it’s less likely to land in the top search results.
Backlinks aren’t the only thing that shapes your site’s ranking — there are plenty of other factors at play — but they remain one of the most important elements. The catch is that earning high-quality backlinks can take time, which pushes a lot of people to try to game the system using “black hat” tactics.
Relevance
Google has many ways of determining how relevant a page is. The simplest signal is whether your page contains “the same keywords as the search query.” But keyword mentions alone won’t help you rank higher in organic search if your page doesn’t match search intent — the underlying reason a user typed that query in the first place.
HTTPS
HTTPS encrypts all data exchanged between the user and the server to improve security. It’s been a relatively minor Google ranking factor since 2014.
How do you know if your site uses HTTPS?
Just look at the browser’s address bar. If there’s a lock icon next to the site’s name, the connection is secure:
Mobile-friendliness
Mobile-friendliness became a ranking factor for mobile search back in 2015. Now that Google has largely finished its move to mobile-first indexing, it’s also become a ranking factor for most sites in desktop search as well.
Freshness
Freshness is an interesting ranking factor because it’s a query-dependent signal. That means it matters more for some keywords than others, and that brings us right back to search intent.
Take the keyword “web design trends.” Every result is recently published.
That’s because freshness matters a lot for this keyword. New trends keep appearing constantly, so users are unlikely to be interested in a roundup from 2021.
Now let’s look at the results for “how to clean a carpet”:
Even though some of these were published recently, some of the top organic results were published back in 2019 and 2021. That’s because freshness simply doesn’t matter here. The process of cleaning a carpet hasn’t changed in years.
How to get more clicks from organic search?
Ranking high on Google is the core of the search traffic formula, but you can drive more clicks by crafting compelling title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs.
These are the three things shown in a Google search result:
Best practices for title tags
- Keep it under 50-60 characters. Longer title tags get cut off in search results.
- Use sentence case, or title case if your page is in English. Never use all caps.
- Include your target keyword. But only when it fits naturally.
- Match search intent. Choose a framing that fits what the user is looking for.
- Highlight your content’s benefit. Tell users why your content is unique (for example, instead of “How to Make an Apple Pie,” write “How to Make an Apple Pie in 20 Minutes“).
- Skip the clickbait. Be honest and don’t oversell it.
Best practices for meta descriptions
- Expand on the title. Add details you didn’t have room for in the title.
- Match search intent. Keep an eye on what users actually care about.
- Use active voice. Speak to the user directly.
- Keep it under 120 characters. Meta description content also gets truncated.
- Include your target keyword. Again, only when it fits naturally.
Best practices for writing URLs
- Write them descriptively. Make it clear what the page is about.
- Keep them evergreen. Strip out unnecessary dates and numbers from the address.
- Avoid keyword repetition. It reads as spammy.
Conclusion
If you want more people visiting your site month over month, you need to understand how you can influence organic search results and how to improve your rankings in Google search.
