Organic SEO is the work you do on your website so that it appears in Google’s regular search results, the ones not marked as ads. There is no single button to press. It is several areas that affect each other: how Google finds your pages and understands them, which searches you should answer, what is written on the pages, who links to you, and how you measure whether anything moved.
How do you do organic SEO on Google? In short, you get your site to appear in search results without paying for every click. Three things sit at the base: content that answers what the user searched for, a technical structure Google can read and understand, and credibility that is built from links and outside signals. With the free tools available today, a site owner can do most of this work alone.
This page maps all of those areas. Each section gives the main answer in a few paragraphs, and most sections end with a list of articles that cover the topic in depth. If you have a specific problem, such as a page that is not getting indexed or a drop in traffic, you can jump straight to the section that deals with it. If you are just starting, read in order, because it is built the way you would check a site: first whether Google sees it, then what it shows, and only then improvements.
Everything written here in Google’s name is based on the official Google Search Central documentation. Where I give my own recommendation, I say it is a recommendation.
How Google works and what organic SEO actually is
According to Google’s documentation, Search works in three stages, and not every page goes through all of them. In crawling, Google downloads text, images and videos from pages it found on the web. In indexing, it analyzes the content and stores it in its database. And in serving results, it looks in the database for the pages that best match the search and shows them. If a page gets stuck in the first or second stage, no improvement to its content will help it appear.
There are two things in this documentation worth remembering. First, Google does not accept payment to crawl a site more often or to rank it higher. Second, Google does not guarantee that it will crawl, index or show a page, even when it follows all the guidelines. This is the fundamental difference between organic and paid promotion: with ads you pay for a place, and with organic you improve the site and wait for Google’s systems to evaluate it. You can read the full details in Google’s explanation of how Search works.
On timing too, Google says in its basic guide that some changes are picked up within a few hours and others can take several months, and that you should usually wait a few weeks before checking whether your work had an effect.
- What SEO is and how it works
- Organic versus paid promotion
- How long SEO takes
- Why my website is not showing on Google
- Search engines other than Google
- What a URL is and why its structure matters
- SEO: questions and answers
Strategy and work plan
Before you change anything, you need to know whether Google knows your site at all. Google recommends a simple check: search Google for site: followed by your domain. If results appear, the site is in the index. If not, you start with the technical requirements and only then move to content.
A good work plan answers three questions: which searches bring you customers, which pages on the site should answer them, and what is missing for those pages to be the best answer. My recommendation is to start with the pages that are already close to the goal, and not to open ten new topics in parallel. A small business site, a brand site and a new business site start from different points, so I wrote a separate article for each of them.
It is also worth knowing what does not work. Google states explicitly that it does not use the meta keywords tag, and that excessive repetition of the same words counts as keyword stuffing and violates its spam policy.
- An organic SEO strategy, step by step
- How to promote a WordPress site on Google by yourself
- How to bring organic traffic to your site
- How to improve your Google ranking fast, and what to expect
- How to rank first on Google: what to check and in what order
- SEO for small businesses
- SEO for a new business
- SEO for a brand website
- An SEO case study
- Mistakes SEO providers make
The first step: connect Search Console and see what Google sees
The site: check only tells you whether the site is in the index. To see what Google actually sees in it, you use Google Search Console. If your site is not connected yet, go to Search Console, add your site address and verify ownership. In WordPress, the simple way is to copy the HTML tag that Google gives you and paste it through your SEO plugin: in Yoast SEO it is under Settings > Site connections, and in Rank Math under General Settings > Webmaster Tools.
After verification there are three reports worth knowing. Performance shows which search terms your site appears for, how many impressions and clicks you get, and your average position. Pages under Indexing (formerly Coverage) shows which pages Google put in the index and which not, and why. Sitemaps lets you send Google your sitemap so it knows which pages exist. The first report to check is Pages, because if important pages are not in the index, no promotion will help them. Google simply does not know them.
There is one thing Search Console does not tell you, and that is how your site looks compared to competitors. It shows only your own data. To see the full picture, search Google for your keywords and see who ranks above you and what is in their content.
Keywords: what people search for
A keyword is the way your customer words their problem in the search bar. The research starts from your services and your customers’ language, continues to tools that show demand and to competitors that already appear, and ends with a decision about which phrase gets which page. Long-tail keywords, more specific and longer searches, are usually where a small site can start to appear.
You can start without expensive tools. The first tool is Google itself: open a private browsing window, start typing a phrase related to your business and see what autocomplete suggests, because that is what people really search for. At the bottom of the results page there are also “related searches” that give more ideas. The second tool you already have: in the Performance report in Search Console, click Queries and see the words Google already associates with your site. Sometimes you discover phrases you had not thought of and already have impressions for.
When you choose a keyword for a page, what matters is search intent, and not only volume. “Lawyer” is a phrase with a huge number of searches, but the competition for it is enormous and it is not clear what the user wants. “Employment lawyer in Chicago” is a focused phrase with a clear intent, and it is easier to rank for phrases like that.
After choosing there is an important rule: one page per search intent. When two pages on the site answer the same question, they compete with each other. This is called cannibalization, and you can spot it in the Performance report in Search Console, which shows which pages appear for each search.
- How to do keyword research
- How to choose keywords for SEO
- Long-tail keywords and how to find them
- Google’s keyword planning tool
- Google Trends for checking seasonality and demand
- Competitor research on Google
- Cannibalization: pages that compete with each other
- Checking your Google position by keyword
- Where to see keywords in Google Analytics
Content Google wants to show
Google writes that its ranking systems are designed to prioritize helpful, reliable information created for people, and not content written to manipulate rankings. It calls this people-first content, and offers a list of questions a site owner can ask about each page. On the same page it explains E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. According to Google, of the four, trust is the most important, and E-E-A-T itself is not a specific ranking factor.
On writing with artificial intelligence, the official position is clear. You can use it for research and for building a structure for original content, but producing many pages with no value to users can violate the spam policy on scaled content abuse. Google’s definition there does not depend on the tool: what decides is whether the pages were created mainly to manipulate rankings, regardless of how they were created.
Page structure matters too: one H1 heading that describes the topic, H2 subheadings that split the content into logical parts, and short paragraphs that are easy to scan. The main keyword goes in the title tag (the page title that appears in Google’s results), in the main heading, in the first paragraph, in a few subheadings and in the meta description. What you do not do: do not stuff keywords into every sentence, do not create pages with thin text just so there is content, and do not copy from other sites.
Within the page itself, Google recommends descriptive URLs and descriptive alt text for images, because it helps Google understand what is in the image and how it relates to the page. Old content that already ranks is usually a better starting point than a new page, and you decide what to update based on the data in Search Console.
You may have heard of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Google explains that they are not a guide to reaching first place. Raters use them to evaluate the ranking systems, and the scores they give do not directly affect a site’s position. They are useful for understanding what Google considers low-effort content with no added value, not as a to-do list.
- Writing SEO content that brings traffic
- Automated SEO content writing and what Google says about it
- Updating old content on your site
- Content strategy
- Content marketing for businesses
- Content clusters
- A content calendar
- Publishing content articles
- Building a blog in WordPress
- The H1 tag and how to use it correctly
- The alt tag for images
- Promoting videos on Google
- SEO for landing pages
- How UI affects SEO
Links: internal, external and incoming
According to Google’s basic guide, it finds pages mostly through links from pages it has already crawled, and in many cases these are other sites linking to you. For Google to follow a link, it needs to be an a tag with an href attribute. Links built only from a JavaScript event without an href are not read reliably. Anchor text matters too, because according to Google it tells users and Google something about the page the link leads to.
Internal links are the part fully under your control. They connect your pages, help Google reach new pages and show which page is central on each topic. Incoming links from other sites are the harder side, and here you need to know the red line. Google’s spam policy defines link spam as creating links mainly to manipulate rankings, and lists among the examples buying or selling links, excessive link exchanges, and using automated programs to create links. You can read the full list in Google’s spam policy.
So where do legitimate links come from? Google writes that links from other sites build up naturally over time, and that you can help by telling people about your site and promoting it. My recommendation is to start with content that others will want to cite, a presence in the professional bodies of your field, and real collaborations with complementary businesses, and also to make sure your business is mentioned in relevant directories and guides. And on the internal side, every time you write new content, look for older related pages and link to them, and also link back from them to the new content.
- Internal links on your site
- External links and when to link out
- How to get links to your site
- How many links you need to move up on Google
- SEO without links
- Checking incoming links
- Removing harmful links
- Buying links and the risk involved
- PBN site networks
- Black hat SEO
- SEO and Wikipedia
Technical SEO: crawling, indexing and structure
The technical part answers one question: can Google reach the pages, read them and choose the right version. A few facts from the official documentation save a lot of mistakes here. The robots.txt file is meant mainly to prevent request overload on your site, and it is not a way to keep a page out of Google. For that you use noindex or password protection. A sitemap helps Google discover URLs, but does not guarantee that everything in it will be crawled and indexed. A small site, which according to Google is about 500 pages or fewer, with good internal links, sometimes does not need one at all, and in WordPress or Wix the system has probably already created one.
Duplicate content, meaning the same content at several URLs, is not a violation of the spam policy according to Google, but it can waste crawl resources. To mark the preferred version, Google ranks the signals by strength: a redirect and rel=”canonical” are strong signals, and inclusion in the sitemap is a weak one. When you move a page permanently, you use a 301 redirect, and when moving a site, Google recommends keeping the redirects for as long as possible, usually at least a year.
Structured data (schema) does not guarantee a rich result. According to Google, a page needs to include all the required properties to be eligible for such a display, and you test it in the Rich Results Test. On speed, web.dev defines thresholds for a good experience: LCP up to 2.5 seconds, INP up to 200 milliseconds and CLS up to 0.1. I wrote the full details on speed in the website performance guide, and I gathered general WordPress problems in the WordPress help center.
On a WordPress site you do not have to be a programmer to handle the technical side. These are the practical checks:
- Loading speed. Go to PageSpeed Insights, enter your site address and see the result. Common causes of slowness are heavy images (convert to WebP and compress), unnecessary plugins (delete what you do not use) and slow hosting.
- Mobile friendliness. Google uses the mobile version of the site for indexing and ranking, and not the desktop version. This is called mobile-first indexing. So open your site on a phone and make sure everything is readable and comfortable, that buttons can be tapped and that text does not overflow.
- An SEO plugin. Yoast SEO or Rank Math let you edit the title tag and meta description for each page and generate a sitemap automatically. You can leave most of the defaults as they are.
- Sitemap and robots.txt. It is worth submitting the sitemap address that the plugin creates in the Sitemaps report in Search Console, because there you see when Google read it and whether it had errors. And a common mistake is forgetting to uncheck the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” box under Settings > Reading.
- Technical SEO
- Getting a site indexed on Google
- Discovered currently not indexed
- Crawled currently not indexed
- The Soft 404 error in Search Console
- A sitemap that does not work
- A robots.txt that blocks Google
- The canonical tag and duplicate content
- Rich results that do not appear
- Site structure in WordPress
- Breadcrumbs and SEO
- Core Web Vitals on a WordPress site
- The 404 error on Google
- Broken links on your site
- 301 redirects
- ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS in WordPress
- Moving a WordPress site without losing rankings
- Removing content from Google
- Fixing SEO problems on a WordPress site
Measurement: Search Console, analytics and tools
Google Search Console is a free Google service for tracking your site’s presence in search. According to Google you do not have to sign up to appear in results, but it shows which searches your site appears for, how often people click, which sites link to you, and it alerts you when Google runs into indexing or spam problems. If there is one tool worth choosing for organic SEO, this is the one.
Google notes that even a business owner who will not use it personally should know it and know the basics of organic SEO. It is also the tool where you give access to a professional, and where Google’s alerts about problems on your site arrive.
Google Analytics completes the picture and shows what happens after the click: how long people stay, where they go next and whether they leave their details. Without working conversion tracking, you have no way of knowing whether the traffic from search brings customers. And as for external tools, Google mentions that it does not evaluate or recommend third-party SEO tools, and that these tools have no access to its internal ranking data.
Anyone who asks how to do organic SEO on Google also needs to know how to measure it. In the Performance report you look at four metrics: impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR) and average position. Once a week it is worth glancing at new errors in Pages, and once a month check trends in Performance: which terms are going up and which are going down. A one-day drop is not a reason to panic. Rankings change all the time, and what matters is the trend. And if there is a term with many impressions but few clicks, it is a sign that the title or description is not attractive enough. Then you improve the title tag and the meta description and follow the change.
- How to read problems in Search Console
- How to measure organic SEO success
- How to use Google Analytics
- Conversion tracking that does not work
- Low time on site
- Website traffic and how to check it
- SEO tools
- Robotic SEO and automated software
Ranking drops, Google updates and penalties
A few times a year Google makes broad changes to its algorithms, which it calls core updates, and announces them on its ranking updates list. According to Google, these updates are broad and not aimed at a specific site, and most sites do not need to worry about them. If you saw a drop that overlaps with an update, Google recommends checking in the Search Status Dashboard that the update has finished, waiting at least a full week after it ends, and only then comparing that week in Search Console to the week before the update started.
A manual action is a different story. According to Google, a manual action is issued when a human reviewer at Google determined that pages on the site do not comply with the spam policy, and it appears in the Manual actions report in Search Console. A drop caused by an update does not appear in this report, so it is the first place to check when traffic falls all at once.
- The site is not moving up on Google
- A Google update pushed the site down
- The Google Spam Update and how to check for damage
- The Helpful Content Update and what happened to it
- A Google penalty and how to remove it
Search with artificial intelligence: AI Overviews, GEO and AEO
According to Google’s documentation, regular SEO practices are relevant to AI Overviews and AI Mode too, and there are no additional requirements or special optimization to appear in them. Google also writes that you do not need to create new machine-readable files, text files for AI or special markup, and that there is no special schema.org data you need to add. Traffic from these features is counted in the Performance report in Search Console, under the Web search type.
This does not mean the topic is not interesting. People also search in ChatGPT and Perplexity, and the question of how to appear there is different from the question of how to appear on Google. In the articles below I separated clearly between what Google says officially and what is known about other engines.
- AI Overviews and their effect on clicks
- GEO optimization
- AEO optimization
- Ranking in ChatGPT
- What Perplexity is
- The llms.txt file
- SEO with AI
- Google Discover
SEO by site type and industry
The principles are the same for every site, but the starting point changes. On an online store, Google notes that a good URL structure matters more, because such sites tend to be large. On Wix and similar closed systems, according to Google you may not be able to edit robots.txt directly, and you will need to work through the system’s search settings. A business with a physical address also needs to take care of its Google Business Profile. According to Google, local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. There is a whole section on this in the Google Business Profile guide.
If you have a shop, a clinic, an office or any business that customers visit in person, it is worth filling out the profile completely: opening hours, real photos, a business description and an accurate category. The name, address and phone number (NAP) should be identical everywhere: on the site, in the business profile, in business directories and on social media. Google writes that businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to appear in local results, and that more positive reviews and ratings can help local ranking. So it is worth asking happy customers to write a review, and replying to every review, even a negative one. Keywords with a location are worked in naturally, for example “family dentist in Denver” in the page title, and you do not plant the city name in every paragraph.
Each industry also has its own emphasis: which searches bring inquiries, what content is expected from it, and which pages matter. The following articles deal with each industry separately.
- How to promote an online store
- SEO for a Shopify store
- SEO for a Wix site
- Organic SEO on an Elementor site
- International SEO
- SEO for service professionals
- SEO for lawyers
- SEO for a doctor’s website
- SEO for beauty professionals
- SEO for real estate agents
- SEO for restaurants
- SEO for hotels
- SEO for a clothing website
- Google SEO for jewelry stores
- SEO for startups
- SEO for nonprofits
When to call an organic SEO expert
Google itself writes that a small local business owner can probably do a large part of the work alone, and points to its basic guide as a starting point. It also notes that a good time to bring in a professional is when you are planning a redesign or the launch of a new site, and the earlier the better.
When you choose someone, Google recommends giving them read-only permission in Search Console at first. It warns against anyone who promises first place, claims a “special relationship” with Google or offers “priority submission”, and writes explicitly that nobody can guarantee first place on Google. You can read its full list on the page Do you need an SEO. Beyond that, it is worth stopping and asking for help when there is a message in the Manual actions report, when important pages drop out of the index for no clear reason, or before moving a site or changing addresses. A sudden, large drop in traffic that your own changes do not explain, or a field with high competition and big players investing budgets you cannot compete with, are also signs that doing it yourself has reached its limit. When you talk to a professional, ask what exactly is included in the work, how success is measured and what the work process looks like over time, and expect full transparency, monthly reports and clear communication. If you would rather have someone accompany the work for you, you can read about my organic SEO service. And if you would like me to check your site, you can contact me here.
- How to choose an SEO expert
- An SEO contract: what to look out for
- Performance-based SEO
Frequently asked questions
What is organic SEO?
Organic SEO is the work you do on your site so that it appears in Google’s regular search results and not in ads. It includes the technical side, content, links and measurement. According to Google, it is not paid to rank a site higher, and ranking is done automatically.
How long does it take to see results?
According to Google, some changes are picked up within a few hours and others take several months. It recommends usually waiting a few weeks before checking whether a change had an effect, and notes that not every change will lead to a difference you can see in the results.
Can I do organic SEO on Google by myself?
According to Google, a small local business owner can probably do a large part of the work alone, and the starting point it recommends is its basic guide. Even if you eventually choose a professional, knowing the basics will help you spot practices Google does not recommend. You can do the basics alone: keyword research, writing content, basic technical optimization and working with Search Console. When you get to complex technical problems or high competition, it is worth considering professional help.
How much does organic SEO cost?
If you do it yourself, the cost is mainly time. Basic tools like Search Console and Google Analytics are free. If you hire a professional, the price varies with the scope of the work and the competition in your field.
Which is better, organic SEO or Google Ads?
It is not either/or. Paid promotion gives immediate traffic as long as you pay, and the moment you stop paying the ad disappears. Organic SEO takes time but generates ongoing traffic with no payment per click. Usually a combination of both is the right approach.
Do I need to know code to promote a site on Google?
For most of the basic steps you do not need to know code, especially in WordPress. Plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math handle the technical settings. Basic HTML knowledge sometimes helps, but it is not required to start.
How many keywords should I put on a page?
There is no magic number. One main keyword per page, and a few related phrases that fit naturally. If you have to force a word in, it is probably unnecessary.
Can I buy links to move up?
Buying or selling links for ranking purposes appears in Google’s spam policy as an example of link spam, including payment in money, products or services in exchange for a link. Links that come from such activity can hurt the site instead of helping it.
Do I need an llms.txt file or special schema to appear in AI Overviews?
According to Google’s documentation, no. There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, you do not need text files for AI, and there is no special structured data to add. Regular SEO practices are the ones that are relevant.
What is the difference between robots.txt and noindex?
robots.txt tells crawlers which URLs they are allowed to access, and according to Google it is not a way to remove a page from results. To keep a page from appearing on Google, you use noindex or protect it with a password.
Someone promises me first place. Is that possible?
Google writes that nobody can guarantee first place on Google, and recommends being careful with anyone who claims to guarantee ranking or a special relationship with Google. An offer like that is a reason to check carefully who is behind it.