A comprehensive digital marketing strategy includes several different tactics – from social media campaigns to pay-per-click marketing. But the cornerstone of online marketing is organic search engine optimisation (SEO).
SEO is the process of fine-tuning the semantics on a website so that search engines can match it to incoming queries. The better a site’s SEO, the higher it will rank in the search engine listings, moving up from through the SERPs until hopefully landing at the top position of page one.
We call these the ‘organic’ search results in order to set them apart from paid search results. In paid search, a website operator pays the search engines to present users with links to their websites when specific search terms are entered. These sponsored listings feature prominently at the top, bottom and sometimes the sides of the SERPs. The organic results are at the core of the SERPs, and they’re entirely free.