How Can You Use SEO to Improve Organic Ranking Metrics

In this digital age, the long-term profitability of the services you sell will primarily be influenced by your site’s online visibility and by the measures you implement to attract both the attention of your core audiences and the crawling agents leveraged by Google. Are you looking to improve organic ranking and optimize your site’s backend elements with a direct impact on content indexability? In that case, you will need to utilize the experience of an SEO provider. Why? There are a couple of reasons, actually. 

SEO is not exactly the fastest digital marketing technique available to market-focused SMEs. However, it is probably the most efficient, and the ROI you can expect from your online optimization campaign will be superior to what is expected from PPC or direct advertising. Unlike in PPC, SEO drives traffic even after you stop directly modifying your site’s backend data. Think of SEO like a train that’s pushed in the right direction. Sure, it will start more slowly, but once it gets going, it will also be much harder to stop. 

Once your pages start ranking well in the SERPs, the results could remain stable for months or even years, depending on the particularities of your website and the algorithm modifications pushed by Google. SEO represents a fantastic way to organically improve the authority of your brand, it’s a digital measure to target high-intent customers, and it’s also a collection of procedures that you can utilize to improve your site’s usability. Plus, search engine optimization can be leveraged both by international conglomerates and SMEs alike, and it represents one of the most cost-effective ways to gather the necessary analytics for the implementation of other, long-term digital marketing measures. 

How Will a Long-Term SEO Strategy Work? 

The answer to this question will depend on the complexity of your website and the particularities of your venture’s domain of activity. That said, as a general rule, in order to help you expertly improve organic ranking metrics, the SEO provider you call will audit your domain for a couple of weeks, and then start your page’s optimization work by changing your site’s architecture or checking GSC for self-evident crawlability issues. The specialist you call will introduce breadcrumb navigation measures inside your pages via internal links, which should automatically help with the indexability of your site’s specific submenus. 

Likewise, the SEO experts you collaborate with will inspect your URL hierarchy and ensure they are utilizing a logical pattern that’s easy to index by crawling bots. Speaking of crawlability, to further the indexation of your site’s internal structure, the SEO provider with whom you work will optimize your robots.txt files, submit sitemaps in GSC, introduce canonical tags in your page’s HTML code and, of course, leverage noindex tags for the content you want hidden from the SERPs. 

SEO is crucial for digital growth, but how well the implemented measures work will depend largely on how responsive your website is and how well you adapt to the latest algorithm modifications imposed by search engines. The SEO expert who handles your case will improve your page’s loading speed by implementing server-side caching with tools like Redis, could make use of a CDN network for faster uploads, optimize your image format, and, not least, improve the security of your site by implementing HTTPS on all of your indexable content. 

What About the Core Web Vitals? 

Do you want to improve organic ranking metrics and enhance your site’s reputation? Then, perhaps the most important thing you need to do is ensure your pages get in line with the core web vitals. First announced in early 2020, the core web vitals are three separate digital performance metrics that are utilized by Google to assess the stability of indexable websites and determine their loading performance. 

The CWSs are, right now, perhaps the most important SERP ranking factor utilized by Google, and for this reason, optimizing your pages for LCP, INP and CLS should be the most important part of a technical optimization blueprint. How long it takes will depend on the complexity of the website and how well you already follow the CWS. That said, in a normal SEO optimization strategy focusing on improving organic ranking metrics, the total elapsed time for CWS modifications should not expand beyond six weeks.

What Are These CWVs? 

The first web metric is the Largest Contentful Paint, which determines the time required for visual elements to finish loading alongside the rest of the indexable article. Have you ever clicked on a website and the images failed to load at the same time as the text? Then that’s an LCP issue that was probably penalized by Google. A good LCP score is anything under 2.5 seconds, and to improve it, your SEO provider will reduce the number of media elements on your pages, leverage CDNs and also modify their format to something more lightweight, like WebP. 

The second metric is Interaction to Next Paint, and it calculates the elapsed time between the user clicking on something and the rendition of the next frame. A good INP score is anything under 200ms, and to improve it, the SEO provider might try splitting load-heavy JavaScript files and optimizing your site’s CSS delivery. Not to be forgotten, the last metric in core web vitals is the Cumulative Layout Shift, which is the calculation of how much the content shifts, unexpectedly, once the page finishes loading. 

Have you ever clicked on something, only for the text to shift slightly and cause you to click on a different result? That’s CLS, and it’s really annoying. A good CLS score should remain under 0.1, and to achieve it, the SEO specialist you call will reserve a fixed space for your site’s dynamic elements, include size specifications in the HTML code of the site’s media, and also eliminate any elements that exist above content without a specific attribution. Optimizing for CWSs will not be easy. That said, it’s the only realistic way to improve organic ranking metrics without investing a fortune in paid ads.