By now, you know that digital marketing strategies are focused on bringing organic traffic to your site. SEO strategies can make or break businesses, making them an important part of any internet marketing strategy. Understanding what organic SEO is and whether or not SEO is dead can be essential in the success of your business. This article will help you learn everything that you need to know about organic SEO and whether or not you may want to incorporate it into your marketing efforts.

What is Organic SEO?
Organic SEO refers to the organic strategies and methods that are used by businesses to rank higher on search engines. In a nutshell, SEO is based on playing Google's ranking factors to your advantage to maximize your visibility online.
For websites, this means optimizing your business's web presence to appear more relevant for a given search query (or keyword) using technical SEO as well as on-page and off-page SEO tactics. The good news is that if you can optimize and rank your business on Google, those same practices are likely to rank you higher on other search engines as well. Because of that, there is no real need to learn more than just Google's preferences.
These are more optimization-focused and user experience-focused approaches to online marketing, versus paid approaches like PPC. There are many benefits to using organic SEO as opposed to paid advertising options.
One major benefit of organic SEO is that you will see its increased value as time goes on. If you keep up with it and run an effective campaign, you should see your website traffic increase with time as you show up for more and more searches online.
When you invest in PPC advertising approaches, your efforts only provide a direct return as long as the ad is actively running. Organic SEO continues as long as you make adjustments to keep your content fresh, relevant, and up to snuff with the latest SEO practices.
Organic SEO is also beneficial because it’s often more affordable than paid advertising methods. Small businesses are able to compete with larger businesses more easily when they use organic SEO. You just need to invest in strategies like learning the best keywords to optimize your content, and then let the content and your website do the work for you.
Is Organic SEO Dead?
SEO experts agree that SEO is not dead; it’s just an ever-changing concept that changes with algorithm updates. Organic SEO actually accounts for about 51% of traffic. SEO has long been the approach used for content marketing and other online marketing strategies, and this is something that isn’t going to go away any time soon. There are many aspects of SEO that have died, while other aspects are constantly evolving to adapt to the algorithm changes made by search engines like Google.
With all of that out of the way, which aspects of organic SEO are dead?
· Focusing all your efforts on SEO link building.
· Obsessing over the top spot.
· Over-optimization of the focus keyword.
· Creating bigger websites.
· Focusing on search engine results, not people.
There are still plenty of SEO tactics that are still regularly used by SEO experts. This includes:
Focusing on the Long Game
It’s important to remember that SEO is all about the long game. Using keywords can take some time to succeed. It can take around 6 months for you to really see the fruits of your labor, but if you've been consistent with your campaign through those 6 months, this is when the fun starts. Organic SEO is still about playing the long game to success.
Create Quality Content That You Adequately Promote
You can promote content all you want, but if it’s not high-quality content then it’s not going to benefit your business. Likewise, if you create stellar content but don’t promote it, you won’t be successful.
Topic Research, Not Keyword Research
Keywords are still important, but topic research is even more important. Use topics and relevant keyword research to create content. SEO tools like SEMRush provide a number of ways to hone in on your ideal targets.
Ways to Improve Organic SEO
Between 70% and 80% of search engine users will ignore the paid search results that they see, which makes it very important to focus your energy on organic SEO results. The good news is that there are things that you can do that will help improve your organic SEO to benefit from the advantages that it offers. This section will take a look at some of the different approaches you can take to improve your organic SEO.
Create High-Quality Content
Content is one of the most important things that you can do for SEO. Studies show that quality content, especially with link building, can be awesome for your SEO. It’s not about how many times you squash the keywords into your article, necessarily. It’s about the quality of content that you are putting out there and how relevant it is to the target keywords you've optimized for.
How does content help you improve your user experience? Your goal is to keep visitors on your page for as long as possible. The best way to do this is by creating great content.
When you create high-quality content, you are attracting visitors as well as giving them reasons to stay on your page for a longer period of time. If you release this content on a regular basis, this will cause people to consistently return to your website on a regular basis. Between people staying on your page longer and regularly returning to your page, you get more traffic that will boost your SEO.
Be Original
It’s not enough to just create awesome content; it’s also about being original with your content. Originality stands out to Google, but copied content tends to stick out like a sore thumb. SEO tends to favor individuality, which is why it’s especially important to not copy content as that can hurt your SEO. Focus your efforts on creating original content that is unique to your website.
Optimize Images
As previously mentioned, images are excellent for SEO. Images have this unique ability to attract the attention of the reader and keeping them engaged with your content. Pictures really do speak louder than words, so it can be a good idea for you to add high-quality images to your website.
You can use pictures that show your products in use or to add visual appeal to your blogs. Images around your website can make your website more aesthetically appealing.
Make sure that the image you choose matches the aesthetic of your site. Although it may not be the most enticing part of the campaign, do be afraid to spend extra time searching for that perfect image. Sometimes little things like this can make an impact on your user experience and bounce rates without you even realizing it.
It is important that you keep the file size and the format in a specific size to have a positive effect on your SEO. If your images are too big, it can slow the loading time, and this will hurt your SEO. You can also add captions to the images that include keywords, which gives your SEO an extra boost.
Header Tags
Visitors to your website do not want to come to your website and end up staring at this massive wall of text. This isn’t appealing to the eye, and it may turn the visitor away from your website; increasing your bounce rate. By using header tags and shorter paragraphs, you are breaking up the content. This will make the text more organized and help the reader find the information that they are looking for.
Conclusion
Organic SEO is far from dead, even though there are some aspects that have died over time. Still, organic SEO is important to invest in to be successful. This is a cost-effective approach to raising your brand awareness and attracting a bigger audience to your company.