What is Organic SEO and How to Get Started in 2025

Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a goldmine that offers an incredible ROI when done right.

It can generate a consistent stream of highly targeted traffic to your website—traffic that has a good chance of converting into your customers.

Since SEO is a little too valuable for startups, entrepreneurs, and new websites to ignore, I’ll help you understand the basics of organic SEO and get started with it in 2025, in beginner’s terms. I’ll keep this article updated as organic SEO techniques and best practices change. 

I’ll be covering the following:

• What is organic SEO?
• Why is organic SEO important?
• How does organic SEO work?
• How to get started with SEO?

A bit about myself first

I’m Naseef, an SEO specialist from Kerala with over 12 years of experience building, managing, and optimizing websites, both failed ones and successful ones.

I built my first blog on Blogger back in 2013, with a blog focusing on Android apps. I learnt the basics of SEO with that blog, then moved on to WordPress as I wanted more freedom and customization options to improve my SEO game.

Over the years, I have managed SEO of several websites from various industries, worked with clients around the globe, and managed websites of a few SEO businesses for better rankings and organic traffic.

Now that you know me a little better, let’s get back to SEO.

What is organic SEO?

Organic SEO, or organic search engine optimization, is the process of using SEO techniques and strategies to improve your website’s presence and natural, non-paid ranking in search engine result pages.

In simple words, SEO refers to things you do to get your website at the top of Google search results, Bing search results, Yahoo search results, etc., for terms and words related to your business, products, or website content.

When you search for ‘blue shoes’ on Google and an Amazon product shows up first, know that Amazon is doing good SEO, and that’s why they’re ranking at the top for the keyword ‘blue shoes’.

Similarly, when you type symptoms of a disease into Google, you get to know which disease has the best SEO, not exactly which disease the symptom belongs to, although Google can be right.

The goal of doing SEO is to get more visitors to your website through the search engine, and hence more business and revenue.

The word ‘organic’ differentiates between natural search results and paid search results.

Why is organic SEO important?

It generates highly targeted traffic that converts.

Well, organic traffic (traffic from search engines) is much more valuable than traffic from social media or direct traffic, as it tends to generate more sales and get more paying customers for the business.

Think of it like this: people don’t Google ‘white t-shirt’ or ‘blue sneakers’ out of boredom. They’re googling it because they are interested in such products. 

Not all of them are going to buy them, but it is reasonable to think that many of them are interested in buying them, and that makes the searchers potential customers. 

Now, the term ‘blue sneakers’ is searched approximately 8100 times a month in the United States alone. And the first result on Google gets an average click-through rate of 27.6%. 

That means the website in the first position on Google for the keyword ‘blue sneakers’ is getting over 2200 visitors a month, straight to their blue sneakers product page.

Assuming a conversion rate of only 3%, the website could be making 66 sales a month easily for their blue sneakers, just by ranking for that single keyword!

Note that they don’t have to spend a cent to keep their position on Google.

In other words, they are generating 66 sales a month for their blue sneakers by ranking for a single keyword without doing much apart from their initial investment in organic SEO.

Much more affordable than PPC, and the results stay for a long.

But why do SEO when you can simply use Google Ads and pay Google to rank in Google search results?

Because SEO is a low-cost method to generate traffic, the results can stay for months or even years, even without making any further investments.

You pay for the initial strategy, content creation, and technical optimization—these are things you can do yourself if you have the required expertise. Once your website is at the top of Google, you don’t pay anything to anyone for the organic traffic that comes through. 

On the other hand, if you go with Google Ads PPC to get yourself to the top of Google, you’ll have to pay the CPC for each click you get. And let me remind you that it can be as much as $50 or even more for each click, depending on the industry and competition.

And the traffic you get from such ads dries out the moment your Google Ads account balance becomes zero.

Now that you know the benefits of organic SEO over PPC, let’s see how it works.

How does organic SEO work?

Search engines do not randomly pick the websites and pages they rank for specific keywords. Each search engine uses a complex algorithm that determines which pages have the best answers to the user’s query.

First, search engines use crawlers, also known as bots or spiders, to crawl the internet and gather information on each webpage. The crawler will go through all types of content—text, images, videos, PDFs, etc.

If the crawler encounters a link, it will access the web page pointed to by the link to add more context to the information it is collecting. The linked pages, visuals, videos, text content, and social media mentions—everything helps the crawler understand the contents of the web page a little better.

Based on the collected information and context, the search engine catalogs web pages in its database called the search index. The process of adding web pages to the search engine’s database is called indexing. 

The search engine algorithm assesses these web pages based on a number of signals or factors, generally called ranking factors. 

Now, when a user makes a query, the algorithm returns the pages that perform the best in the assessment on the search results page, also called SERP. 

The algorithm and ranking factors used by each search engine will be different from others, so doing SEO for one search engine may or may not rank your website on other search engines.

But in many cases, if the content is good and the website is user-friendly, fast, and authoritative, it tends to rank in multiple search engines for similar keywords.

The point is, if you optimize your website for users by providing them with the information they’re looking for, in a simple, appealing, fast, and user-friendly manner, you have better chances of ranking at the top of Google.

This is what SEO is all about.

Let’s dig a little deeper and see how you can start your SEO journey.

How to get started with organic SEO?

The following steps will help you get started with SEO. It won’t make you an SEO expert, but it will give you a good understanding of SEO best practices.

Once you have gone through the following section, you’ll be able to start optimizing your website and think from an SEO perspective when you create content.

You’ll start thinking from the SEO perspective every time you make changes to your website.

You’ll also be able to decide whether to outsource SEO or to do it on your own.

The three components of a successful organic SEO strategy

1. On-page SEO

On-page SEO deals with the page elements of your site, such as the quality and relevancy of the content, images, meta tags, HTML tags, content structure, etc. 

In simple words, the page elements should scream to search engines that the page has high-quality content relevant to the users by using a language that the search engines can understand.

Remember, the focus is and always should be on users, not search engines. Search engines can easily identify content built for search engines, and they ignore such content. The point is to make your website and content as user-friendly as possible.

Treat your users well, and Google will treat your website well.

Without on-page SEO, the following two SEO components become ineffective. 

2. Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is all about the SEO best practices that take place outside of your website. 

It’s all about showing popularity on the internet by getting other trusted websites to link to your website, mentioning NAP (Name And Phone) and brand, and generating product and brand reviews and social shares.

While On-page SEO is your own website telling Google that you have quality content, off-page SEO is other websites telling Google that you have quality content. 

If you have a great product and customers are talking about it on social media, Google will consider it when ranking your product. Similarly, if other websites mention your website where it is relevant and apt, Google will consider it when ranking your website.

Again, if your website has great content, or if your product is great and other websites and users are mentioning it on the internet, your off-page SEO will become better, without you taking any effort.

3. Technical SEO

Technical SEO deals with the overall performance, user experience, and crawlability of your website. It’s about making your site easy to navigate for both search engines and users alike.

Technical SEO is just a layer of cream on on-page SEO and off-page SEO. It definitely contributes to the overall ranking, but it alone cannot get you to rank on the first page.

Also, great on-page SEO and off-page SEO coupled with poor technical SEO can result in poor rankings.

This is basically your website’s speed, architecture, user-friendliness, .htaccess, etc. come into play. And you have to take care of many technical SEO aspects in your website’s development stage itself as poor technical SEO can nullify the effects of good on-page and off-page SEO.

Now that you know the three critical components of organic SEO, let’s see how you can start optimizing your website.

1. Start with user research, not keyword research

A keyword means the phrase or words that people type into a search engine to find the information they’re looking for. So, keyword research means the process of finding those keywords.

While many SEOs would suggest starting SEO with keyword research, experienced SEOs would only suggest starting with user research, because inexperienced SEO professionals fail to see the bigger picture.

While Google used to look for the keywords in the content to understand what it is about, advancements in AI have changed it completely. Google now understands what the content is about, regardless of the keywords.

Google is trying to give answers to the questions users are asking, so obviously, they try to rank content that has the answer users are looking for, not the keywords users are typing in.

So the first step in SEO is to understand your users’ behavior, needs, and intent. You can use keyword research and competitor research to understand your users better—what type of content they like, what their pain points are, what questions they usually have, etc.

You may use tools like Ahrefs, Moz, or Ubersuggest to understand what users type into search engines.

2. Write content focusing on users.

Once you have a good understanding of what users are looking for, it is time to develop content around them.

Think from the user’s perspective—say, your users are searching whether to go for shared hosting or dedicated hosting. While both have pros and cons, shared hosting is for small websites, especially websites of startups and small businesses that do not generate much traffic yet.

Most importantly, if the users are asking such a question, it is likely that they have a small website or they are just going to build a website.

So when you develop content around it, you might want to dedicate one page to comparing dedicated hosting and shared hosting from a beginner’s perspective, clearly mentioning the difficulties they are going to face along the way.

And, there’ll definitely be a number of small yet important questions they have related to shared and dedicated hosting services—so you might want to add an FAQ section answering them.

Add images and videos if it adds more context, convenience, or makes it easier to grasp. Link out to resources from trusted sources that are relevant to the topic you are talking about; add infographics to prove your points.

When adding images, make sure you add alt text—text that describes what the image is about.

If content is too long, consider dividing it to sub-sections and adding a table of contents to make it easier to navigate.

While you might have extracted a number of keywords through keyword research, don’t make the mistake of intentionally stuffing keywords in your content.

If they come naturally in your content, it’s great for SEO. If they don’t, that is also great for SEO, cause keyword density doesn’t matter anymore.

Google’s AI now generates answers for our questions based on what it finds on the internet. Isn’t it too naive to think that such a powerful algorithm looks at keyword density to differentiate between quality content and poor content?!

3. Optimize the technical aspects of your website.

When it comes to technical SEO, it is much better to take care of it when developing the site than doing it at a later stage. Most of the technical SEO best practices are to be done just once, and you only have to fine-tune them and make changes only when there’s a major change in technical SEO.

The first step is to test your website using Lighthouse or Page Speed Insights. It’ll give you an idea of where your website stands in terms of performance and user experience, along with suggestions to improve the score.

If your website scores 90+, your website is performing great. If not, make sure your website loads fast, becomes interactive quickly, and offers a great user experience.

You can enable caching, use WebP images instead of JPEG or PNG, and defer or async unnecessary JavaScript files to improve your score.

To improve your technical SEO, you can make sure you have a good link architecture. You can divide your blog posts or pages into categories and make each page easier to navigate from your home page.

In fact, each page on your site should be accessible in 2-3 clicks from the homepage for ideal results. Since search engine bots follow and go on to crawl each linked page, it is necessary that each page on your site is closely connected to the homepage.

Other technical SEO aspects include:

• Specifying a preferred domain—www or non-www version
• Optimizing .htaccess for SEO
• Having an XML sitemap and submitting it to Google Search Console
• Optimizing robots.txt file 
• Making your 404 pages SEO and user-friendly

4. Build high-quality backlinks naturally

Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website.

Having backlinks from trustworthy websites is an extremely important part of SEO—the more competitive your website niche is, the more important backlinks become. 

Results at the first position on Google have 3.8 times more backlinks than positions 2-10, telling us how backlinks make the difference between position one and the rest of page one rankings.

While links from trusted, high-authority(read: high-quality) websites can improve your rankings, links from low-authority websites can negatively affect your rankings. So, where you get your backlinks from is as important as getting backlinks.

Now, you’ll see several SEO professionals telling you that you can buy or exchange backlinks, do guest posting, or go for a HARO strategy to improve your rankings. 

But the truth is, as Google’s algorithm becomes more advanced, all those tactics are going to be obsolete.

According to Google, any links that are intended to manipulate rankings may be considered spam. 

You may be able to buy backlinks, do guest posting for backlinks, or exchange backlinks to get a temporary boost in rankings that may last a few months at best. But Google does have tons of data that will help it identify such links in the near future.

There were several other backlink-building strategies in the past, such as forums, PBNs, etc. All of them have become obsolete as Google became smarter, and so definitely all the current strategies will become obsolete in the future.

Google’s thinking is that if your website is user-friendly and has content of exceptional quality, it will generate backlinks naturally.

People who read it will share it. Web masters who read it will be happy to refer to your content on their website as it helps their users.

Content is, and will always be, the king.

Focus on content, try to get more shares and backlinks by producing content that is shareworthy—conduct research and publish the findings on your website, create white papers and infographics, develop great free courses, or predict industry trends through data analysis.

You are free to think out of the box, you are free to walk the extra mile to help your target users. That additional step, the additional effort, is what usually generates backlinks and traffic.

Establish yourself as the thought leader in your industry, the internet will generate backlinks for you.

5. Keep yourself up to date.

SEO is a quickly transforming industry; an SEO expert today will not be an SEO expert two months from now if they don’t keep themselves updated. The strategies you implement today might not work a year from now.

Google makes hundreds of minor updates to its algorithm a year. They also make around ten major updates a year that alter the search results significantly.

And with each update, the SEO best practices and techniques change a little bit. And so, keeping ourselves updated is a big part of the game. 

You can bookmark our site to get detailed SEO guides, but here are some websites and profiles you can follow to know what’s happening in the SEO industry:

Search Engine Journal

Search Engine Journal is one of the most authoritative and popular websites in the SEO industry. They publish several articles about SEO each week and discuss the latest developments in the industry, and also conduct weekly webinars. 

Search Engine Land

Search Engine Land is another popular and authoritative website in the SEO industry. They publish several articles on SEO, PPC, and SEM. 

John Mueller

John Mueller is a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google. He hosts the Google Search Central SEO hangouts. You’ll see many of his answers to Twitter questions roaming around in SEO groups and communities.

Gary Illyes

Gary Illyes is another Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google. He’s an active participant in Google Webmaster Forums and also contributes to Google Search Central Blog. Bookmark the Google Search Central blog too!

Organic SEO: FAQs